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.  

---------------------------------

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?

Artwiculate - some of my tweets (2)

^  thanks to @StarofSavannah for creating this picture of Ludovic

 

Artwiculate is a Twitter-based word game. Each day a new word is published, all the tweets with that word appear on the Artwiculate site, and can be voted on. Here are some more of my efforts :

"misnomer" (wrongly-named) :

The "Unsinkable" Titanic gloated at high speed over the Atlantic until her misnomer was corrected by an iceberg

Guy walks into a bar and injures his head. It was actually a steel girder . #misnomer

Shooting stars are a misnomer : they are not stars, nor do they carry guns 

I am what I am ~ not your sculptured misnomer ~ and I will survive . #haiku #GloriaGaynor #ElizaDoolittle

"indubitably" (undoubtedly):

"Holmes, I deduce that right now, Mrs Hudson is downstairs preparing a tray of tea for us" "Indubitably, Watson - it is 3:55pm"

indubitably : a short step from the Penumbra of Uncertainty into the sunlight of "Yes" .

stardust within me ~ lights my way to who I am ~ indubitably . #haiku #artwiculate

When the heart reaches higher ground & stands awed at life's new sunlit vistas, we indubitably feel that eternity is here, now

"pandiculation" (stretch & yawn):

prison pandiculation : a long stretch

When we're apart my arms stretch out / And weep at empty air / Pandiculation, in my heart / Love smiles - I find you there

"odalisque" (harem virgin):

Just be yourself - ask nothing, love, from me / And then your willing odalisque I'll be

The vanquished night, the eastern sky, a pale gold nascent disk / A new day dawns & I'm still here: Light's passionate odalisque

"surreptitiously" (furtively, with stealth):

On the eastern horizon, a rosy glow surreptitiously transforms grey to gold, a diurnal alchemy heralding the coming of the light

You phoned me repetitiously

And love-bombed me capriciously

Stole my heart surreptitiously

You're now my life, deliciously

tiptoe through my life ~ surreptitiously hoping ~ someone notices . #haiku

"gesticulate" :

Guy walks into a bar and orders a Gesticulate. Barman: "That's two fingers of Scotch, and one finger of dry ginger, right?"

The sun & rain in harmony gesticulate their adoration of this bejewelled Earth, and a rainbow is their love child.

Gesticulate : the early worm flips the bird.

I gesticulate ~ not waving but drowning ~ no-one sees . #haiku

"odious" (hateful) :

His poems were poor, his odes odious, his verse even worse

Guy walks into a bar & orders an Odious. Barman: "Beer topped up with creme-de-menthe, Coke, & Cherry soda, yes?" #NowIFeelSick

odious to part ~ our symbiosis wreckage ~ weep for lost love . #haiku

Odious - the new cologne for ex-boyfriends : "Because You're Not Worth It"

 

"symbiosis" (lifeforms joined in mutual dependancy) :

Waves die on the shore, caressing the sand which hugs them gently as they slide back into the vast ocean; symbiosis of land & sea

You and I, arm in arm, heart to heart, soul to soul. 1 + 1 = 1. Symbiosis.

music needs silence ~ sound born in space, returns home ~ symbiosis art . #haiku

Artwiculate - some of my tweets (1)

Artwiculate is a Twitter-based word game. Each day a new word is published, all the tweets with that word appear on the Artwiculate site, and can be voted on. I've been playing for 3 months, and these are some of my own efforts :

"Oneiric" (dreamlike) :

I pass through the mirror into an oneiric landscape: I walk under a green sky, on clouds lit by a billion stars beneath my feet

oneiric lives ~ terrestrial wanderers ~ chasing the dawn . #haiku

Oneiric is as oneiric.. melts the faces of time over washing lines into a metamorphosis of fish, strangeness and charm . #Dali

"Penchant" (taste for):

a cold wind blows from hell, and zombies with a penchant for beautiful thoughts are eating my brains . #cookery #eatingout

If this was the last day of your life, my friend - tell me, wouldn't you have a penchant for what each second brought you?

Oh hold me tight! Caress my penchant for you until passion's flame ignites, & we'll come to rest at last in love's afterglow. 

penchant for living ~ savouring each breath he takes ~ condemned man's last hour . #haiku

"Flibbertigibbet" (flighty - especially a young woman):

flibbertigibbet ~ flighty there, but never here ~ butterfly life  . #haiku

"Why, Mr Darcy, do you think me such a flibbertigibbet as unable to comprehend that we two inhabit a best-selling novel?"

"Brogue" (type of shoe; dialect):

Brogue - walk the talk?  

"Fungible" (interchangeable):

human beings ~ stardust, golden, unique ~ never fungible . #haiku

"Languor" (languid, listless, dreamy):

In languor deep we lay

As sun announced the day

Exhausted from the fray

Of night-long passion's play

No dragons more to slay

our anger spent ~ exhausted from the fray ~ yield to languor . #haiku

"Holy doze Batman! It's.. The Languor!" "I'm ready, Robin - coffee, amphetamine, Jane Fonda video.. I'll just take a nap first"

"Parsimonious" (stingy, mean):

Otto the odious octopus was extremely parsimonious: he'd give with one hand, and take with seven

"Yesternight":

Yesterme, yesteryou, yesternight, yesterlove . #artwiculate #StevieWonder

Sir Lancelot got Guinevere, Sir Galahad got the Grail, Sir Yesternight got to do all the washing up & cleaning

Dracula bows ~ fantasy in black velvet ~ yesternight . #haiku

Yesternight we kissed ~ scents on the breeze of today ~ love's open window . #haiku

Guy walks into a bar and orders a Yesternight. Barman: "We don't open until 6PM yesterday evening - come back then"

How many syllables should be in a haiku?

"Easy - it's 17 syllables (5-7-5), everyone knows that!" Well, in Japanese, that is perfectly correct. Haiku is one of their principal literary forms, even more so than - say - the sonnet is in English. Many writers of haiku in English therefore believe this discipline translates directly, and that a true haiku in English must also be 17 syllables, arranged in 3 lines, 5-7-5.

But consider this (one of the earliest Japanese haiku) :

fu-ru i-ke ya ~ ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu ~ mi-zu no o-to

It doesn't need a knowledge of Japanese to realise that those "syllables" (they are actually called "onji") are of almost equal length. Therefore the metre of a Japanese haiku flows naturally.

Now look at this, in English :

strength is pitiful ~ if not married to wisdom ~ a thought for today

This is the 5-7-5 syllables of a Japanese haiku, but it has a different feel. Disregarding the content for the moment, the sound and flow is not the same. 'Strength' takes as long to say as the three syllables of 'pitiful', and likewise 'thought' is another weighty syllable. Unless uniformly short syllables are chosen (which would be artificial), it is impossible to re-create the metrical sound, flow and feel of a Japanese haiku in English.

On its own, this does not matter too much. English can certainly "adopt" the metrical discipline from another cultural form, and use it to create its own versions. But then there is the issue of content. Returning to the Japanese haiku above, its direct translation into English is : 

old pond - frogs jumped in - sound of water

Which is a syllable count of 2-3-4. In fact, Japanese "onji" say less than English syllables, and therefore the Japanese haiku - 5-7-5 - nearly always translates into English as something rather smaller. The haiku is truly succinct, far more so than the 5-7-5 micro-poems they've become in English.

What do we conclude from all this? First, it is not possible to convey the Japanese metre of a haiku in English, unless almost by accident. Second, a true haiku uses fewer images, and more succinctly, than its 5-7-5 English equivalent. There is absolutely no reason why English should not attempt the discipline of writing micro-poetry that incidentally employs the 5-7-5 count of Japanese haiku, but whatever you end up with, they are not real haiku.

Writing English haiku should be perfectly possible, but to capture the spirit of the Japanese form, fewer syllables and fewer images should be used. What is the ideal? Very difficult to say - each poem should be taken on its own merits; however, anything from the 2-3-4 of the frog poem above, to perhaps 4-6-4.

A lot more could be said about the haiku : the difference between haiku and senryu; the need for a 'seasonal' reference; the 'twist' or 'contrast' of two ideas, images, or concepts. But for now, I wanted to address the "hot potato" of the syllable count, a source of controversy and disagreement.