Common English Blunders

“Loose” vs. “Lose”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Verbs, Versus

Many people write “loose” when they mean “lose” instead.

Problem:
The verb “lose” does not look like it would be pronounced with the oo sound, so many people mistakenly choose the “oo” word (“loose”) instead.

Explanation:
As I’ve written in an earlier post, it’s true that “loose” can be used as a verb as well as an adjective.

However, when used as a verb, “loose” does not mean “stops having”; this definition belongs to the verb “lose” instead.

If you look up the origins of these two words, you see that:

  • “lose” — pronounced [looz] — is derived from Old English losian;
  • “loose” — pronounced [loos] — is derived from Middle English los, loos.

Knowing the origins of these two words does not help me to remember the correct spelling. In fact, I don’t know how I keep them straight (no mnemonic comes to mind), but I do.

Solution:
Simply memorize that the verb “lose” is spelled with one ‘o’.

Second, then Third, then First

Common English Blunders

This post is about courtesy, not necessarily about grammar.

Let’s look at a couple of rules of courtesy:

  1. It’s courteous to put the listener first.
  2. It’s courteous to put others ahead of you.

Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly common to hear both of these rules violated, especially by younger speakers of American English.

Examples of sloppy speech:

  • “Me and you can go to the store now.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it does not put the listener first; (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“me” instead of “I”).
  • “Jim, Mary, you and I should leave now.” is sloppy because it puts the listener second.
  • “Send it to myself and Bob.” is sloppy for two reasons: (a) it puts the speaker ahead of the third person (“Bob”); (b) it uses the wrong first-person pronoun (“myself” instead of “me”).
  • “I and they want the green paint.” is sloppy because it puts speaker before the third party (“they”).

Here is how the above rules of courtesy get translated into grammatical terms:

  • If you are including your listener in your statement, put him or her — “second person” — first.
  • Then, if you are including others in your statement, put him, her or them — “third person” — second.
  • Finally, if you are including yourself in your statement, put yourself — “first person” — third.

Following these rules, we get these corrected examples:

  • “You and I can go to the store now.”
  • “You, Jim, Mary and I should leave now.”
  • “Send it to Bob and me.”
  • “They and I want the green paint.”

Summarizing the rules in grammatical terms, we get this order in which to put the people within a list in a statement:

  1. Second person
  2. Third person
  3. First person

“…, and etcetera.”

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Redundancies

I heard this during a telephone call yesterday.

Problem:
The phrase is redundant.

Explanation:
The noun “etcetera” — abbreviated as “etc.” — means and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

So “and etcetera” literally means and and other unspecified things of the same type or class.

For fun, I searched Google for “and etcetera” (including the quotation marks) and found about 67,200 matches.

Suspecting that this was only part of the story, I then searched Google for “and etc.” (including the quotation marks) and found about 9,280,000 matches.

Combining the matches for the abbreviated and unabbreviated forms, that’s over 9.3 million matches for this redundant phrase!

Solution:
“…, etcetera.”