It's lose not loose....

[weeks]

Many Americans don't have a clue on what it is like in other countries. They have a centralized mentality, the World is America.

because it's extremely expensive to travel to other countries from here, and canada is basically america lite.

i wish i had the good fortune to live in europe sometimes, i'd love to have five or six countries a short train trip away

you drive from france to russia is like new york to cali

[Dex]

It's fool's gold, not foolsgold.

[SequSpur]

Fool's Gold.

[wildbill2u]

It's not just the foreigners, tbh

This. As a part time university teacher of writing, this is one of the most common errors by students of all grades. I think it is the result of teaching phonics in the schools. I even saw it used once in an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. To me, it's like dragging chalk over a blackboard, but I've become resigned to the failure of educators to teach English properly.

[baseline bum]

This. As a part time university teacher of writing, this is one of the most common errors by students of all grades. I think it is the result of teaching phonics in the schools. I even saw it used once in an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. To me, it's like dragging chalk over a blackboard, but I've become resigned to the failure of educators to teach English properly.

I would fail every paper and exam I graded where someone wrote loose in place of lose.

[NameLess Scrub]

English is not my 1st language.
Education at my land is not the best.

But I can tell "your" from "you're".. come on.

[Chinook]

This. As a part time university teacher of writing, this is one of the most common errors by students of all grades. I think it is the result of teaching phonics in the schools. I even saw it used once in an editorial in the Houston Chronicle. To me, it's like dragging chalk over a blackboard, but I've become resigned to the failure of educators to teach English properly.

There are so many grammatical mistakes that people ignore 95 percent of them without even realizing they're mistakes unless someone points it out. Take your second sentence for example. What is "a part time university teacher of writing"? It's you, not "this". So it should be "As a part time university teacher of writing, I find this to be one of the most common errors by students of all grades." And 'part-time' is hyphenated when used as a descriptor.

I don't say that trying to be superior, either. I was a copy editor for a few years, and I'm practically dyslexic now. I can't get through a post without some mistake. I'm still anal as when it comes to hyphenating and using what are now archaic AP Style guidelines (like capitalizing Internet and Web), but I almost always leave s's off the ends of words and type 'it's' even when I mean 'its'. Those aren't political statements. If I see them, I fix them. But there's something about the reply window take (edit: that) makes me unable to catch my mistakes until I hit the enter key.

[NameLess Scrub]

There are so many grammatical mistakes that people ignore 95 percent of them without even realizing they're mistakes unless someone points it out. Take your second sentence for example. What is "a part time university teacher of writing"? It's you, not "this". So it should be "As a part time university teacher of writing, I find this to be one of the most common errors by students of all grades." And 'part-time' is hyphenated when used as a descriptor.

I don't say that trying to be superior, either. I was a copy editor for a few years, and I'm practically dyslexic now. I can't get through a post without some mistake. I'm still anal as when it comes to hyphenating and using what are now archaic AP Style guidelines (like capitalizing Internet and Web), but I almost always leave s's off the ends of words and type 'it's' even when I mean 'its'. Those aren't political statements. If I see them, I fix them. But there's something about the reply window take (edit: that) makes me unable to catch my mistakes until I hit the enter key.

Is the "second sentence" example you pointed out a grammatical error? Or a semantic error?

[Chinook]

Oh, and to get into the spirit of this thread, my current biggest pet peeve is when people add apostrophes to pluralize things. It's very rare that you need one, and there are other uses for the punctuation that are worlds more common that it makes no sense to confuse the issue by using them.

[Chinook]

Is the "second sentence" example you pointed out a grammatical error? Or a semantic error?

I'd say it was syntactic, as there (edit: the) juxtaposition of the words has a different formal meaning than the intended meaning. However, I would consider it grammatically sound linguistically, since the sentence is intelligible. And the informal meaning is easily understood nowadays, so it's even more fine grammatically.

[polandprzem]

You losers. Foreigners have less errors then you Americans tbqh

[ohmwrecker]

You losers. Foreigners have less errors then you Americans tbqh

than

[taps]

than

Ohm your too old to get trolled that easily.

[Solid D]

Sequ'spur

[wildbill2u]

I would fail every paper and exam I graded where someone wrote loose in place of lose.

This aberration is just the one that seems to bother me most. If I graded papers the way my middle school and high school English teachers did, almost every student would fail the course. And they actually resent it when you point out errors and try to teach them. You wouldn't believe how many come out of high school without the ability to write a simple declarative sentence--and yet they got all "A" grades.

Then comes the dreaded 'teacher evaluation' at the end of the year, and if you grade the little dears as you should, you are evaluated as a bad teacher or too strict by those you tried to help.

[wildbill2u]

Chinook, You'll note that the "this" was followed by a period. It was meant as an short-cut affirmation of the cited quote above, not a part of the next sentence.

[Blake]

The one that gets me when watching basketball is when the score is something like 93-90 and the commentator will say "...and the team has now pulled to within 3"

No they haven't....

[Chinook]

Chinook, You'll note that the "this" was followed by a period. It was meant as an short-cut affirmation of the cited quote above, not a part of the next sentence.

Was talking about this "this".

As a part time university teacher of writing, this is one of the most common errors by students of all grades.

The dependent clause is meant to modify you, but you make the misused diction the only subject of the sentence. So the formal meaning is that the use of "loose" instead of "lose" is a part-time university teacher of writing.

[Blake]

Chinook, You'll note that the "this" was followed by a period. It was meant as an short-cut affirmation of the cited quote above, not a part of the next sentence.

Lol I think Chinook busted you

[NameLess Scrub]

Was talking about this "this".



The dependent clause is meant to modify you, but you make the misused diction the only subject of the sentence. So the formal meaning is that the use of "loose" instead of "lose" is a part-time university teacher of writing.

He might have just omitted part of the phrase because this is an internet board and we get lazy.

[NASpurs]

Hopefully SAGirl reads this thread.

[Chinook]

He might have just omitted part of the phrase because this is an internet board and we get lazy.

As I said in that first post, there are things we say that we don't even think about being incorrect because we all understand the intended meaning anyway. When I was a copy editor, it would all stick out like a sore thumb. But as a linguistics student, it really didn't bother me at all. (Yes, that was intentional.)

[NameLess Scrub]

This aberration is just the one that seems to bother me most. If I graded papers the way my middle school and high school English teachers did, almost every student would fail the course. And they actually resent it when you point out errors and try to teach them. You wouldn't believe how many come out of high school without the ability to write a simple declarative sentence--and yet they got all "A" grades.

Then comes the dreaded 'teacher evaluation' at the end of the year, and if you grade the little dears as you should, you are evaluated as a bad teacher or too strict by those you tried to help.

If you go even farther (hope I'm using the right one here), I work in a professional technical industry and you could be surprised about the amount of people that struggle with either of the 2 official languages, but still manage to do an adequate, sometimes above average work.

They struggle a bit at the communication/written areas, of course, but it isn't a deal breaker.

[NameLess Scrub]

As I said in that first post, there are things we say that we don't even think about being incorrect because we all understand the intended meaning anyway. When I was a copy editor, it would all stick out like a sore thumb. But as a linguistics student, it really didn't bother me at all. (Yes, that was intentional.)

I don't think I got what the intentional thing was.

[Chinook]

I don't think I got what the intentional thing was.

That last sentence was the same error that I first pointed out. I should have said, "But once I became a linguistics student, it didn't really bother me at all" or something like that.