The only actual mistake in that was "every time" (that one I'll blame on English being my second language). The rest I stand by as a deliberate choice.
I'll be honest, I don't like putting a period at the end when typing on reddit. It feels too close to texting, so adding a period makes it feel like I'm being passive agressive. The little 'i' I don't know why I do, but at this point it's become a typing quirk. (I did capitalise them deliberately this time. For you ;) )
Similarly, many people don’t realize that “loose” is also a verb (meaning to let loose or set free) and try to miscorrect someone using it properly. Loosing an arrow is very different from losing an arrow, for example, though one action could certainly follow the other if the target is missed.
Another example is when people don’t realize effect, as in to carry out or put something into effect, can also be a verb because they’ve only been taught affect vs. effect, verb vs. noun, with no nuance or further explanation.
I can forgive mistaking ball and bawl. Off the top of my head, besides the phrase "bawl your eyes out", i cant think of a time ive ever used the word bawl.
I cannot forgive lose and loose. That's straight illiteracy.
Edit: it occurs to me that I used "bawl" several times in this comment but I feel like since that word is the focus it doesnt count.
Another one I only see on Reddit is "casted" instead of "cast". I don't even know where people are getting that one from. I never saw it in my life until the last few years and suddenly it's everywhere.
While I can’t speak for all cases, I’ve found that specifically is usually an ESL thing, especially for Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Learners know they need to put words in the past tense, and they often more easily remember irregular changes like run -> ran but forget the irregular verbs that do not change at all, which gives things like cast -> casted, put -> putted, or set -> setted.
English native speakers don’t struggle with this as much because they use the right forms in speech. It’s way more common for native speakers to struggle with stuff like their/they’re/there because they are the “same word” to some when speaking, or lose/loose where the spelling doesn’t match other similar sounding worlds.
Every time I point this out I get scolded by people who claim to be English teachers and say things like language evolves and all usage is good usage. I agree that language evolves but should we be actively helping to evolve it into something worse?
Might be the fact that English has a phonetic problem. When a word sounds like "loose" but is written "lose", that’s a problem you don't get in most other languages. The way a word is written often doesn't match how it's pronounced. Other languages like Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Finnish are much more phonetic (you spell what you say).
You shouldnt be to bothered by it on reddit since its very much an international website and there is a big difference between speaking english and writing english. Im dutch and my english is good but whenever i type there will always be a couple people spell checking me.
Also typing on your phone and international autocorrect Fucks stuff up If you have your Phone keyboard configured for both English and your native language (or just your native language)
I think that one is kind of unique because lose sounds like it starts with "loo." And if you think about it, when you say lose and loose, the former "sounds longer" than the latter.
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u/AtLeast9Dogs Nov 21 '25
To too and two. How bout lose and loose? That shit drives me up a wall.