I promise not to go grammar-Nazi here, although I expect in the coming months I’ll be posting more often on language (it’s the topic of my upcoming PhD study, after all). But I’ve just seen yet another articulate, carefully written and obviously proofread article talk about “loosing” (in this case, “loosing who we are”). And I think I may have spotted the early stages of a genuinely new influence on language evolution: the spell checker.

First, the facts that we should agree on: “loosing” is a deliberate action of casting loose, while “losing” is an accidental and often bitterly regretted action of misplacement. The second is discussed far more often in normal speech than the first, yet I see the first extraordinarily often on otherwise highly literate websites. (I’ve also found it while proofreading essays for fellow students, but if memory serves these were usually written by non-native speakers of English, so there may be a bias there.)

And now the speculative bit: what is going on here? I think it’s very simple: people are trusting their spell checkers, perhaps their grammar checkers also (“to loose” is, after all, a transitive verb just like “to lose”), and not getting a second proofreading opinion. This is of course particularly the case for blogs; what serious blogger asks someone to proof their post before hitting “Submit”?

And more speculation: what will be the long-term effects? I suggest that within ten years “to loose” will be accepted by a major dictionary as a spelling variant of “to lose”. (Enough examples of the accident in otherwise good-quality prose examples, and people –particularly children and second language learners– will start adopting it as canon.) More generally, I think we’ll see either a near-quantum jump in the quality of spell-checking software (which I don’t think is very likely; it seems something awfully close to strong AI is needed to really work here), or a whole slew of language changes that can be explained, like this one, by spell-checker blindness. (The substitution of “wether” for “whether” is a personal favourite of mine, although not one I expect to catch on.)

I don’t use a spell checker myself. This is partly due to hubris, partly to laziness, and partly because I honestly don’t think it matters so much on my private blog. I do, however, proofread. I frequently make small changes in the first half-hour or so after posting. And if I find a mistake later than that, I’ll correct it. So this is also a request to my readers: if you spot something, use the comments here to let me know. No matter how trivial, with the following exceptions:

  • I know that sometimes my left- or right-quotes (both single and double) aren’t correct. This is an issue of the software I’m using which I can’t be bothered fixing at this juncture (it has possibly even been resolved in a more recent version, who knows?).
  • Please don’t take me to task for British spellings. Or for American spellings. Or for some illegitimate offspring of the two. I grew up in New Zealand, and my daily reading diet these days is the Internet. I’m a bit muddled, sure.

(At least one regular reader of this blog –he knows who he is– could profitably start applying such a scheme on his own site. Or he could give me write access, Wiki-style, like I’ve pleaded so many times. Just a thought. Actually, there could be a WordPress plugin in there: login as “proofreader” and you’re allowed to change up to five characters in any post. Something to think about next time I get motivated to play with php again.)