Loosing Site of What Matters: Internet Spelling

Editing senses... tingling!

teh baba disugrees!

Another Shep-ism that's grinds my gears is "rEdiculous".

Ridiculous, dammit!!

Riiiiidiculous.
iiii!!! iiii!!
Say it with me. Teeth out, iiiiiii!

See?

Riiiiidiculous.

iiiii!

Ridicule. Ridiculous.

There's no such thing as redicule.

Jesus fuckballs that one's been getting to me.

It happens a lot in newspaper form as well nowadays. Makes for a successful future career for me.

To me, a big difference between site/sight and lose/loose is that the former is easily distinguished by etymology, if you'll think of being situated at some site where you can take a seat and sit down in situ so that you'll be all set without any gh anywhere in sight, whereas the latter is just arbitrary orthography for the sake of distinction. And that's why I never know how lose/loose works. Is there any easy rule by which to remember that?

I doubt it's "constantly"....I can't think of many occasions I'd have to use the word "loose"

While i AM a HORRENDOUS speller....usually it's as much bad typing as lack of knowledge of the proper form, nay, MORE often.

but when a typo like a dropped letter or transposed letters (my two most common mistakes) happen to form an actual correct spelling, I usually won't catch it....the extent of my proofreading goes just as far as the spellcheck goes.

i don't waste my already wasted time proofing something as unimportant as a BBS post. what goes up under my name should always be considered "rough draft"

Now, if I'm posting on my blog or something that's a little more high profile I take more time.

So, if you see me misspell righetous (left misspelled on purpose!) or ridiculous or some such that I DO have trouble with - that's spelling

if you see lose for loose or even the wrong form of "there" or "your" on occasion, that's either a simple misstroke typo or a "stream of thought" error (i.e. fingers running on autopilot while brain is creating a thought rather than concentrating on the exact right word)

BTW, speaking of your original point, in my opinion the worst offense going right now BY FAR is accept/except

I have actually seen seemingly professionally generated signage in a store or kiosk (I know, someone did it on a printer but i just mean it wasn't hand-written) which said, in a stylish and otherwise attractive way:

"Credit Cards Excepted"

loose= looooose

lose= lahse

Now THIS one on the other hand I plead guilty to. There's a list of probably 15-20 odd words that i just somehow manage to never get right and that is one of them.

I use them seldom enough that I forget them just enough to "outthink myself" trying to remember the right form.

Still, if you see it lately you just saw a post i neglected to spell check....straight spelling erros shouldn't show up as often lately unless I just get absentminded and don't even look before I click submit.


BTW....Is this going to be a thread where all we talk about is MY mistakes?

Edit to add-

Usually when I have trouble with a word i fall back on a phonetic attempt and sometimes that cause a mistake because of regional pronunciations.

Around here, people tend to pronounce it RE-dick-u-lus as often as they do rid-ick-u-lus

um... thank you? now can someone explain that to me?

Explain? I take you don't mean the meaning? Loose, something not being tight enough, think loosey-goosey. Lose, like a lose on the stock market, um.....long "o".......can't really think of any other way to remember it.

Exactly. See:
Cry “havoc!” and let loose the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Except that you can loose sleep over something. If the astros in another thread don't tie things on themselves, they'll loose those things. Etc.

I mean i'm baffled by "lahse".

To be fair to Shep, I've seen quite a few posters spell ridiculous that way. It got to a point where I wondered if this was one of those words Americans spell differently. Pop it in the search feature and you'll see what I mean.

Pronunciation. That's how it sounds.

Ok, thank you again. Unfortunately, that doesn't work with my German-raised brain. If "lahse" is a pronunctiation, that looks like Italian "la" and French "c'est" to me, and that can't be right; I might be losing my mind, but I'm not lacing it. I might be a lost cause for this.

Exactly! That's what I thought. Which makes "lahse" mysterious, right?

I can sort of see loss=lahse, but lose=lahse?

yeah... here it'd sound like luze. The single o hardens the s.

I've been told to stop correcting peoples' spelling on hobbytalk.com because they're sick of me doing it. Then if I happen to spell a name wrong, or transpose two letters in a word (as I do often enough), they leap all over me and yell "tit for tat!!" as if it were equal to their gross misuse of the "to/too/two," "site/sight" and "they're/there/their" synonyms.

I broke down yesterday when someone talked about the "Marquis" in Trek, and told them there ain't no damn R in the word. The guy, being German, said he wasn't a native English sepaker and I should be more lenient. I pointed out the words in question were French.

WRONG!!!!

Loose and Lose have the same vowel sound, which I'll call a long U for lack of a better term (such as in 'glue"). The difference between the two is how the "s" is pronounced. In Loose, it's a soft, typical "s" sound such as in "sick". In Lose, it's a hard "z" sound, as in "zoo".

You're assuming that there will actually be newspapers in the future.

hahahaha

I try to proofread what I'm writing but stuff slips through anyway. It does work on that other level though so I can claim that I did it on purpose.

Worse than spelling, IMO is usage, particularly of two simple, commonly-used words: "then" and "than."

They don't even sound the same. How anyone can repeatedly transpose the two

"Than you are a better poster then I am."

OMG, I finally figured out what the problem is. I'm too fucking tired to be dealing with this and I was thinking loss when I was reading lose. Jayzus....I'm sorry people.

Any time people use the wrong word, it's worse than spelling the word wrong, since you give the impression that you don't even know the meaning of the word.

Even though I think that typing things like "ur" instead of "your" or "you are" is really annoying, I still find that typing "your" in place of "you're" (or vice versa), makes you seem even more stupid. There are some stupid abbreviations that people use online, but they aren't as bad (to me) as using the wrong word.

It's painfully obvious when people who rarely read anything decide to write something. You find all kinds of homonyms that get swapped, and all kinds of words that are spelled phonetically rather than correctly.

"Loose" instead of "lose" is an extremely common mistake online. Since winning and losing is something that is discussed often when playing games, you see people saying "I don't want to loose" all the time when you are playing online. Interestingly, I've never seen anyone call someone a "looser".