Guest guest Posted November 7, 2002 Report Share Posted November 7, 2002 Here’s the solution: most people in the world are neither American nor English. Their mother tongue is quite different than English, and it might even be written/read from right to left, up to down etc. “Loose” just happens to both sound right and pass the spellchecker. Micky (without ‘e’). J -----Original Message----- From: S [mailto:pete533@...] Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 5:54 AM Subject: [ ] Loose or Lose?? I am not trying to be sarcastic, but it is something that bothers me. It seems that on almost ALL internet groups, whether it is this one, the main list, diet groups, bodybuilding groups, whatever.. People seem to spell lose - loose. As in, if I loose too much weight, my trousers will be too loose. I just find in curious. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted November 7, 2002 Report Share Posted November 7, 2002 Off-topic, but I gotta respond to this. Nationally, Americans and Brits collectively account for under 400 million of the world's 3 billion or more English speakers (depending on what qualifies as 'speaks,' which could raise or lower this number). Americans do not speaker 'American,' they speak and write dialects of the English language, which involves several unique spellings that largely exist among no other groups (though the promulgation of such minority variants is rapid due to the American domination of world and electronics). Case in point, cheque doesn't pass the spell**checker**, though to the majority of English readers and writers, a check is (as a noun) a mark on a paper, a response, or a measure. It's safer to speak of " Englishes " since the language is not a clear entity, though the best source on the language with the broadest integration of words and their appearance is the Oxford English Dictionary, which is very likely NOT the dictionary of our spellcheckers (in fact, nearly all spellcheckers disallow the standard OED spellings...). Mr. Webster messed up the system when he tried to reformulate American spelling, except he only did it part of the time and with no degree of regularity. Best, ________________________ Gifford 3-5 Humanities Centre Department of English University of Alberta www.ualberta.ca/~gifford Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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