To want to punch ALL the people...

[fillimum]

... who talk about wanting to 'loose weight'? On any weight loss topic on this site and on others I would say that about 75% of people write loose when they clearly mean lose. ARGH!!! I am not overly pedantic about grammar and spelling etc (well I am a little) but the amount of times I see this drives me to distraction!

Same to you Shiney, happy new year!

IMO only really dull people care about things like this.

I bet you wouldn't say anything about it in rl, you'd soon loose all your friends..

Edam, don't know too much about speech habits (as opp. to written), I'm afraid. I'm doing all my psychology second-hand because my training is in English. But I seem to remember my little brother continuing to use hyper-correct past tenses (eg. 'sleeped' instead of slept). I don't know why some children do it and others don't, but my guess would be it has to do with how he memorizes things. Basically, if he is strong on categorizing and seeing patterns, he'll find it that much harder to accept the exceptions to the rule. Certainly with adults, you find situations where the adult knows they are writing the wrong thing, but they continue to do it because the muscle memory has become strongly set. But whether or not this is similar would depend on whether your little one knows he's doing it wrong, or not.

I think mistakes and how/why we make them are really interesting, it's only the glitches that give us any idea that there's a great complex system helping us get from hearing/sight to memory to language. But I accept for most people it's just a pedantry vs. carelessness debate

(Btw, I think Simon Baron-Cohen or someone did research on hyper-correct speech in mathematicians ... vague memory that there was the maths bods tended to have used hyper-correct speech as children.)

My personal bugbear is when people merge two words into one: i.e, 'alot', 'straightaway', etc.

Ooh, Littlered, that's fascinating about adults continuing to make mistakes even if they know the right word because their muscle memory has been set. Golly.

I thought all children created regular past tenses when they are learning to talk though - and therefore in writing to some extent? ds is quite happy with exceptions to the rule and v. good at spelling, I just can't bear to correct his spoken past tense. I was very struck when a child psychologist pointed out to me their brains are actually doing something really clever by working out what the past tense should be, even though they've never heard anyone use the word 'goed' for e.g.

Edam I have the same 'problem' with my 8yo DD she just adds 'ed' onto everything no matter how many times I tell her.

Edam, yes, it's pretty cool, isn't it? I didn't mean to suggest it was a 'problem' in any real sense btw, just that it's one of the glitches that says really interesting things about what the brain is doing. If children didn't do that, we might assume they learn every word by rote and then get taught the grammar later, but clearly they don't, they recognize the grammatical structure first, then modify it with exceptions.

This is why I think mistakes in grammar shouldn't be put in the same boat as mistakes in spelling. This example suggests that there's some innate predisposition towards grammatical structure, whereas spelling is a much later, more artificial convention (seeing as how we could perfectly well have chosen to write in a pictogram script like Chinese).

Anyway, I think I've wandered from OP's no-doubt more fascinating question ...

I quite like the image of loosing weight...like you can just set it free into the ether. If only.