For the Love of Porcupines, People! Learn How to Spell Before I Loose My Mind.

Believe me, you don't want that thing running amok in the streets.

A trend is emerging among those who choose to write in my native tongue (which is English, for those who are wondering). This trend is so pervasive, so devastating, so utterly horrifying that I can barely bring myself to blog about it. And I wouldn't, if I didn't feel that it is my duty to the literate world.

Of what terror do I type? Drug abuse? Poverty? Violence? Well, sure, all those things are bad, and something should be done about them. But no, I type of something which, if it continues, is going to cause me to totally loose it.

It's the slaughter of the English language.

If I didn't spend so much time on interwebs message boards, I would have no idea how frequently the language I love is getting the living crap beaten out of it. (This includes MBs where the majority of the posters are aspiring professional writers and their misuse/misspelling of words provokes a bang-head-on-desk desire like nothing else.)

One such offense bothers me more than others--I'll explain why momentarily--and what is especially appalling is those committing said offense are not first graders or teenagers, but adult humans (as opposed to adult porcupines--you don't even want to know about that MB).

For some reason, many, many, many people cannot grasp the difference between lOse and lOOse. On one MB I frequent, there are often posts about someone wanting to loose weight, or loosing their favorite spatula, or their machete.

All I want to post in response is: okay, Sweetcheeks, if "lose" is spelled l O O s e then how the frickety-frack do you spell "loose"? l O O O s e? Or do you think lose and loose are spelled exactly the same way, that they're freaking interchangeable? I mean this one should really be a no-brainer. Other egregious examples of kicking English in the junk will be addressed in later posts. Some of those are at least a teensy, tiny, itsy-bitsy, weeny bit more understandable.

But for this one, there's no excuse for a literate person for whom English is their first language. And I'm using the term "literate" looosely.