Grousing about loose

would've

Do they use the warning sign: "Duck or Grouse" over there (in drinking establishments with low ceiling beams)?

Ya' mean, y'all?

Haven't seen one, but I bought a rubber duck to nail above the low door into my backyard shed.

i ain't never be changing my way of speekin irregardless of wat y'all our tellin me

Nice thread; lose/loose is my biggest spelling pet hate too.

Native speakers should know better - I'd get it more if loose wasn't a word in its own right. What's the opposite of tight? Right. Now what's the opposite of win? Right. So...

which/that

Give examples of correct usage.

"When do I get to verse him?"

I get asked this question by elementary age kids at a chess club constantly. When I heard it from a high school student, I decided the future was grim.

There are a lot of people who know 4-5 languages and watch movies, read newpapers in different languages and communicate in diff languages with different persons. An interesting case of my friend's family: his mom, dad and he spoke in diff languages with each other and none of them was english.

Expecting perfection in all of these languages is nearly impossible. They just make it a point that the idea is communicated.

I thought right was the opposite of left.  What is the opposite of write?

"The usage is intimately tied up with the distinction that grammarians make between two types of clause, which they call restrictive and non-restrictive. A restrictive clause is one that limits, or restricts, the scope of the noun it is referring to. Take these examples:

The house that is painted pink has just been sold.
The house, which is painted pink, has just been sold.

In the first one, the clause “that is painted pink” is a restrictive clause, because it limits the scope of the word “house”, indicating that the writer doesn’t mean any house, only the one that has been painted in that particular colour; if he takes that clause out, all that’s left is The house has just been sold: the reader no longer knows which house is being referred to and the sentence loses some crucial information.

In the second example the clause is non-restrictive: the writer is giving additional information about a house he’s describing; the clause which is painted pink is here parenthetical — the writer is saying “by the way, the house is painted pink” as an additional bit of information that’s not essential to the meaning and could be taken out."

Non chess players have a 50-50 chance of orienting the chess board correctly on the movie set, but they get it wrong 63% of the time. I'm not asking for perfection when I suggest that 55% correct would be nice.

Lose is misspelled 68.89% of the time on chess sites. 30% wrong is a light year from perfection, but would be a welcome improvement.

Lepht?

read

Good answer!  I laughed aloud.  LA is shorter than LOL, what's the deal?  Probably want to avoid confusing it with Louisiana or Los Angeles, I guess.

Now you're being silly. It's simply that 'aloud' is too poncy for the average pleb. Anyway, you can do more with lol. Lolorific. Lolacious. Loltastic. Oh, Lolita.

lol. How did you get the exact stats for that, upto the second decimal??

Anyways, my point was not about lose/loose. I should have quoted. One person commented that its because people are stupid and another pointed an error in "people that/who" which, I think, is clearly asking for perfection.

Just remember - Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.

I read somewhere that 87% of all quoted statistics are made up. Sounds about right.

Getting back on topic, I've been saying since I first got on the internet, in the early 90's, before it was really popular, that the first two casualties of the internet were spelling and grammar. Civility was third.

--Fromper

Indeed, but it is reasonable to expect people to speak their own language accurately.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

I read every internet forum post about chess in the past ten years and counted.

7,896,245 use either lose or loose to discuss the failure to win or draw.

5,606,334 misspell lose as loose