Using the word loose as the word lose. Why?

[kwetu]

It seems so many on MN use loose in place of lose, I see it on here regularly. Could possibly understand if they had similar meanings..but they are not interchangeable in any way to my knowledge.

Loose has a long oo sound in most accents that I am familiar with, what accent pronounces it with an o sound shorter than lose?

I think many spelling errors are due to AI. I’m starting to see some very unwanted autocorrections when I type on my phone. The more populated the linguistic database is, the worse it seems to get. As a true pedant with less than perfect eyesight I am mortified sometimes by the autocorrected guff I manage to send out.

Drives me mad too Op!
I'm on the weight loss threads and it's often repeated there. I keep wanting to say "if you LOSE weight your clothes will feel LOOSE"! Having to sit very firmly on my hands to not do so, so thank you for starting this thread! 😂

Also feel that it's a relatively new thing; why is that? 🤔

I’ve been sitting here saying them out loud, and they sound different. Odder v odour. Aw v O.

I think it's been like this since the early Spellcheck. You could type loose or lose/ break or brake, bare or bear and none of them would be misspelt but would have a 50/50 chance of being the wrong word.

Odder and odour are completely different.

Thank you! That helps me understand.

Yes, accents vary of course, but the dictionary phonotic spelling was what I was referring to in reply to the previous poster.

It's just a mis spelling not a confusion between the words. It's very common that people do this and I thought that was obvious as to why. But apparently not.

Aye this

Of course, but I was using the pronunciation of the first ‘o’ to explain how I pronounce border and boarder. @VisitationRights glad you got it.

Why? Because they never bothered to learn. There was a post this week where the OP and most of the replies used “loose” instead of “lose”. What about your/you’re, to/too, their/they’re/there? It boggles the mind.

I'm quite interested in pedantry. There are two types of pedants - those interested in language and those interested in criticising others.

I hate it when people get it wrong but if I see it I never point it out. You don’t know someone’s circumstances. I remember someone correcting a spelling mistake Jamie Oliver made and his mum responded to say about how much he’d achieved despite being dyslexic and that error was insignificant as we all understood what he meant.

There’s a third type, those who have a visceral reaction to misspelling, mispronunciation and poor grammar. It’s not personal, but it’s jarring and makes them uncomfortable. I’m like that. I don’t want to criticise others but neither do I want them to hurt me!

And now I’ve had to edit my own post

It’s because these days a lot of people never read anything that isn’t an internet post. My education was shit but I read a lot of books, so my Spag is reasonably good.
It’s also fashionable to defend ignorance and claim it doesn’t matter, whereas I think the ability to communicate clearly is pretty vital.
My spelling etc is in no way perfect but I wouldn’t mind if mistakes were pointed out to me. That’s how you learn.

For some reason I really struggle with this one, no matter how many times I use it and spell check is no use. People pointing it out doesn't help either, my spelling isn't always the best.
Sometimes I'm surprised by people not knowing the same things that I'm knowledgeable about (often practical common sense), but I'd never voice those thoughts.
Edited to add after reading a post above, I read a lot, decent fiction and factual stuff, as well as technical manuals. It doesn't transfer to my own spelling and grammar.

I have found that the autocorrect has become much worse recently. I have found it leaving "I" as a lower case "i" and it interchanges "its" with "it's" to be wrong almost 100% of the time.

I spend longer proof reading these days and correcting autocorrect than I did writing in the first place. It is almost not worth having it.

Yep, guilty. I’ve outed myself there clearly.

It’s funny how it’s difficult to envisage other people’s accents properly though. In my internal English accents ‘border’ and ‘boarder’ are quite distinct. They’d maybe be the same to my internal American? But even then my internal kiwis, Aussies etc would have none of it.

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Yes! this definitely annoys me too.

Agree with this. See also definately and alot.

This is a fantastic point btw. The more common AI gets, the looser (loser?) language is going to get. It learns equally from other people’s mistakes as it does from their proper work. And then it’ll learn from its own mistakes soon enough.
I wonder how it’ll play out? It could be a complete disaster, at least insofar as making the internet unusable.

It would be funnier if they used "loos" for both words.

"I'm going to loos my shit!" Ok not that funny...

Yep there was a thread just yesterday where nearly every poster on there, did it. Even my year 5 DC knows the difference