It's LOSE not LOOSE !!

There is an epidemic on the internet. The word "lose" (as in, "I'm rapidly losing my marbles over this awful spelling") seems to have become "loose" (as in "set loose the dogs of war upon these miscreants"). 

It's everywhere!! In fact, it seems to be on the point of replacing the correct spelling "LOSE" altogether. I am not exaggerating when I say from my own observation, that the incorrect spelling is now more common than the correct spelling.

There are two words. One is LOSE, the other is LOOSE. They mean different things.  Yet more and more (on the Net), they are being spelled the same way. For anyone who doesn't know, here are the differences between the two words:

LOSE - to suffer deprivation of (something) 

LOSE (verb) : "I win - you lose"

LOSING (participle; adjective) : "losing my mind"; "the losing hand"

LOST (past tense) : "I lost my way"; "the lost sheep"

LOSER : "you, who cannot spell. LOL"

LOSS (noun) : "I experienced the loss of my sanity"

- - - - - - - - - 

LOOSE / LOOSEN - to untie or to set free; make less tight

LOOSE / LOOSEN (verb) : "I set loose the tiger" "I loosen my seat belt"

LOOSE (adjective) : "the belt feels loose to me"

LOOSED (past tense) : "the dogs were loosed by Montgomery Burns"

(there is no noun)

And if you already spell it correctly, then make my day - if you see LOOSE for LOSE online, put it right! And if the person gets annoyed, send them to me.  :-)

Proposed Petition to Artwiculate

Artwiculati! Please read the following, and let me know what you think. If you like it, then leave a comment for me here, and I will go ahead and post the petition in GetSatisfaction. 

If you disagree with any of the points (someone has already said that point 4 might not be practical), then please also comment. Many thanks.  

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We, the Artwiculati, are endlessly passionate about this wonderful game : the creative buzz of composing erudite, poetic, heartfelt, or just plain witty, tweets, and we love the social life that goes with it. Once again, we reiterate our thanks for the fact that it exists.

But, we don't feel that the social networking aspects of the game should become the measure of or means to success; we feel that there should be a 'level playing field' for all players, and we applaud your continuing efforts to achieve this.

There are a few ideas to help this even further, which have been discussed quite a lot recently. We would like to put them to you, and therefore...

We, the undersigned, being passionate about Artwiculate, humbly petition the people responsible for the running the game, as follows :

1. Please make all kinds of RT count equally. If this is not technically possible, then please stop RTs from scoring at all.

2. Please equalise the different time zones by introducing a 25-hour day for the game.

3. Please remove the voting button from individual players' profile pages, i.e. all voting to be 'blind' from the main site (this will also help to deter "voting to influence results" which undoubtedly follows on from your 'front runners' announcement)

4. Please restrict voting to the players of the game. For example : 

• only those following @artwiculate, and 

• only those with a minimum points tally, to prove they actually are players

If you, like us, believe these changes will help, please try them out for a month or two

Please respond to this, so we know what your thoughts are :-) 

What words or phrases do you hate? (1)

These I have hated

Most people have words or verbal habits they dislike intensely, or even hate. I'm no exception! So here I am going to begin what may become the first of many threads as I pour out my invective against these hapless linguistic tics.

1. Attendee

Pre-eminent among them (for me) is this sorry abortion of a word. I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back and have strong words with the twonk who first coined it. Or perhaps hit them over the head with a saucepan to prevent them polluting the gene pool :-) 

I would say to him (or her) "Weren't you taught the rules at school? Were you asleep that day? Do you REALLY want to bequeath your ignorance to the future in perpetuity? It's quite straight-forward : "

EmployER : the one who DOES THE EMPLOYING (active)

EmployEE : the one who IS EMPLOYED (passive)

And so with InterviewER / InterviewEE, ExaminER / ExaminEE, and so on.

With "attendEE", who or what IS BEING ATTENDED (passive)? Why, surely, the event itself! So the conference, seminar, workshop, meeting, or whatever, is the only "attendEE" here. The people actually ATTENDING (active) must be "attendERs". Was it too difficult in Twonk Land to see that? Sigh.

I suspect I know how it happened, or can guess. There was a confusion between being "invited" to an event (INVITEE - quite correct), with actually "attending" it. And now it's too late to correct, and we are sadly stuck with it.

2. Going forward 

I have never actually met a "normal" person (i.e. one who doesn't use this horrible phrase) who doesn't wince at the very least when they hear it. The perpetrators are nearly always company spokespeople, and maybe the occasional politician.

Sometimes it is partnered with "in the future", so we end up with the abysmal tautology "in the future going forward".

Please, people - STOP IT!! It's just NewSpeak, an Orwellian-sounding piece of pseudo-professional nonsense. It means nothing, or rather it means "in the future", or "from now on", two perfectly good English phrases which could and should be used instead.

3. Electrocution

This is a perfectly good word. When properly used. Which it isn't, often.

Its origins are quite clearly defined by the Oxford English Dictionary :

ELECTRICITY + EXECUTION

Folks, you can't survive being electrocuted! It means you're dead dead dead. It does NOT mean the same as "getting an electric shock". It means "getting an electric shock which kills you".  Clear now?