it makes sense

[tigriswolf]

This morning, while listening to a song, I realized why people use 'loose' when they meant 'lose.'

'Loose' looks like it should rhyme with 'choose.' Alas, it does not. 'Lose' does. Because English is weird.

You know what else is odd? ‘Goose,’ ‘moose,’ and ‘loose’ all rhyme. ‘Choose’ and ‘lose’ don’t rhyme with any of those. And then there’s ‘chose,’ which I’ve seen when people meant ‘choose.’ And ‘chose’ doesn’t rhyme with any of the other words in this post. (Okay, it does, but not any of the words in quotation marks.)

So, yeah. ‘Loose’ vs ‘lose’ has been bugging me for a while, and I’m just glad to finally get the mistake.

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

We just say 'got' in the south of England (I think 'gotten' might still be used in the north); there's no got/gotten distinction. In the US you'd say 'I haven't gotten around to that yet' (I - I think; there's a chance I'm getting this wrong), whereas you'd hear 'I haven't got around to that yet' over here. People will call 'gotten' an Americanism, but that's not strictly correct, because it didn't originate in America; we used to say 'gotten', but it fell out of use over here at some point after America was colonised. We do still say 'forgotten', though.

(That was a slightly longer answer than necessary. Er, sorry. I'm incapable of shutting up about the English language.)

[tigriswolf]

(Me, too!)