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Losing vs. Loosing

jefboyardee

jefboyardee

Extreme Android User
People get these words mixed up so often:

Losing:
Fail to keep or to maintain; cease to have
Fail to win
Suffer the loss of a person through death or removal
Place something where one cannot find it again
Miss from one's possessions; lose sight of
Allow to go out of sight
Fail to make money in a business
Fail to get or obtain
Retreat
Be set at a disadvantage
Get rid of
​
Loosing:
Grant freedom to; free from confinement
Turn loose or free from restraint
Make less tight or stiff
Become loose, looser or less tight
​
Now stop it before I loose my mind.
 
I've never heard loosing used before. I would use release or loosen for most of the same situations.

Just seen it as a misspelling of losing
 
Thats the problem with the english language- too many words sounding the same; spelled differently with meanings that only make sense to the person who decided it should be a word.
 
Things like that on the Internet is the biggest indictment of the American educational system there is. (I don't see English fluent non-Americans making the same mistakes constantly.) Unfortunately I can't think of an effective way to reverse the damage. At least not alone. I'd love to see a movement, but I can think of a few much more important things that I'd rather see addressed by widespread social involvement.

So call me a looser and I won't object to you're opinion. ;)
 
Speed Daemon said:
Things like that on the Internet is the biggest indictment of the American educational system there is. (I don't see English fluent non-Americans making the same mistakes constantly.) Unfortunately I can't think of an effective way to reverse the damage. At least not alone. I'd love to see a movement, but I can think of a few much more important things that I'd rather see addressed by widespread social involvement.

So call me a looser and I won't object to you're opinion. ;)
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Well, you can't blame the American education system entirely...

OMG! Oxford English Dictionary adds LOL

But I doubt any movement will gain any momentum. Considering the popularity of reality TV shows, I'm surprised Orwell's doublespeak isn't the norm already.
 
How about your vs. you're.... uh!!!! That chaps my hide. I mean come on now. Sure we all had, who knows, how many classes english reading and comprehension. At least try to get it right. anywho, what about them yanks???? Ah Hhhh...lol
 
GHOTI - that spells FISH according to George Bernard Shaw.

I think it's the s sound rather than the double O that confuses people. The blame it on O but lose is pronounced looze, and loose is just as spelled with a softer s.
 
netlinkz said:
How about your vs. you're.... uh!!!! That chaps my hide. I mean come on now. Sure we all had, who knows, how many classes english reading and comprehension. At least try to get it right. anywho, what about them yanks???? Ah Hhhh...lol
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Not sure contractions count. You do know what 'you're' means, right? IT means 'you are,' iffin you do not.

As for 'Your' it is a form of the possessive case of you used as an attributive adjective. I looked that definition up because trying to remember it was mind melting.

You are welkome!
 
jerofld said:
Well, you can't blame the American education system entirely...

OMG! Oxford English Dictionary adds LOL
Click to expand...

Ah, but dictionaries are like journalists. They don't make trends, they only chronicle them. Maybe OED's attempt to lose its "stuffy image" (that's what they said IIRC) has gotten a tad ridiculous though.

But I doubt any movement will gain any momentum. Considering the popularity of reality TV shows, I'm surprised Orwell's doublespeak isn't the norm already.
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Funny that you should mention doublespeak, because I and others use it on a regular basis! LOL

I don't think there will be any movement, not on the Internet. But I still remember an event from when I was an undergrad in college, working for the school's ITFS station. It was the lecture after a midterm test, and it was a graduate biology class. The instructor announced that the entire class had failed the midterm because they had failed to write even complete sentences in an essay exam.

That was back in the '80s, before the Internet was a household fixture. I hope that higher education is the place where people do take a stand for a minimum acceptable standard in English composition. I'm not confident that it will. Over the Thanksgiving holiday I was staying in the same hotel as the University of Illinois football team when they played Northwestern. I never saw any players but did share an elevator with the UI cheerleaders. They could have been speaking Martian from what I heard.

At least Northwestern, a private school known for its academic excellence, trounced the Illini. :D
 
netlinkz said:
How about your vs. you're.... uh!!!! That chaps my hide. I mean come on now. Sure we all had, who knows, how many classes english reading and comprehension. At least try to get it right. anywho, what about them yanks???? Ah Hhhh...lol
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If you'll look back, you'll find that I poked fun at that particular problem. It's interesting that apparently nobody noticed!
 
Well English isn't my native language and I've got to say I've misused "loosing" before learning that it really was "losing" (same with "loser", "lose", etc). Maybe it's because of the pronunciation. I'm no expert but when you look at a word like "hose", it's not pronounced the same as "lose". So to me it was natural to add the second "o", as in "loose" or "zoo".

Hopefully that made sense. :p
 
DaSchmarotzer said:
Well English isn't my native language and I've got to say I've misused "loosing" before learning that it really was "losing" (same with "loser", "lose", etc). Maybe it's because of the pronunciation. I'm no expert but when you look at a word like "hose", it's not pronounced the same as "lose". So to me it was natural to add the second "o", as in "loose" or "zoo".

Hopefully that made sense. :p
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Makes sense to me.

I've been told that English is the most difficult language on earth to learn. A number of ESL people have said that Americans' extensive use of the idiom makes things especially hard. All of my ESL friends and colleagues became fluent in English before the Internet was big, so my experience doesn't take into account the power of the Internet to hasten miscommunication. ;)
 
Its not right to chastise other's for there poor command of the English language. Even if your proficient yourself. We have to learn to except human weaknesses and besides whose to say I'm perfect myself?
*somewhere a grammar-nazi is hyperventilating*
 
I've been told that English is the most difficult language on earth to learn.
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As seen from America: just like its people, its words were originally borrowed from Europe, then transmogrified over the years. It has no origin to point to, other than England, which did just as much word-borrowing, from France for instance.

So I have no trouble believing that it’s the hardest to learn. I guess I’m just lucky to have grown up in it, cuz I had no luck with any other languages.
 
It seems to me that English is one of the easiest language to learn. It's really simple and pretty straightforward. My native language is French, it's more complicated.

For example every single object has a "gender", for a chair you'd use the "female" adjectives/pronouns but for a couch it would be "male". There's no way to tell, you just have to know them all.

Another thing would be the verbs: in English it's all the same except for the third person ("he", "she", "it"). Even then the rule is pretty simple. In French, it's always different for every pronoun "je/tu/il/nous/vous/ils".

Etc..
 
l-1625.jpg


:laugh:
 
Desert and dessert
College and collage

I always have to think twice about those. If I don't I'm either eating sand or making higher education an art form.
 
a few more Easily Confused Words, lots more there

accept and except
affect and effect
alright or all right
canvas and canvass
complement and compliment
council and counsel
dependant and dependent
discreet and discrete
effect and affect
except and accept
illicit and elicit
inquiry and enquiry
its and it's
loath and loathe
material and materiel
plain and plane
practice and practise
principal and principle
prophecy and prophesy
role and roll
stationary and stationery
story and storey
their, there and they're
too or to
vain, vein and vane
weather, whether and wether
whether or if
who or whom
who's and whose
 
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