-
Announcement
-
Simtropolis Returns! 05/26/2026
See here for details about our site recovery efforts.
-
Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'spelling'.
Found 1 result
-
I realize that many of us do not have English as a first language, but many of we native English speakers are being too careless with what we've been writing. English is full of homonyms (words with different meanings that sound the same) and this is why "look and say" spelling doesn't work. Are we in too much of a rush to get it right? Maybe, but there is little excuse for some of the regular "dillies". The most misused word in the forums lately has been the preposition 'to' in place of the adverb 'too' meaning excessive. These have the same pronunciation but completely different meanings. The most common use of 'to' is as a particle defining an infinitive: e.g. 'to be'. This misuse is often just a typo but it make reading posts difficult and choppy. That extra 'o' being omitted quite often causes a rescan of the sentence to verify that the word really was intended to be 'too'. Effectively, this is a case of "more haste, less speed". 'loose', 'lose' is the pair that triggered this post. One must distinguish between these which are not homonyms, can easily be confused by non-English speakers, and can change the meaning of a sentence when used wrongly. Loose most of the time means free, and it is both an adjective and a verb. It never means unable to find which is a meaning of lose. E.g. I wanted to set him loose but I was afraid he would lose himself. Loose is pronounced with the double 'o' sound and an unvoiced, hissing 's' the same as goose or moose. Lose has a shorter 'o' and the 's' becomes more sibilant and voiced, closer to 'z'. It sounds like ooze. We are all in a hurry, and don't often take the time to read back what we have written, but remember that what you put in writing represents you, personally, unless you are very careful indeed. As native English speakers, we need to set a good example to others and not be too casual.
- 55 Replies
-
- 13
-
