How many times must I see otherwise-educated people mix these two words up?
Lose = to misplace something or to be defeated;
Loose = to untighten, or an adjective describing objects that are not securely fastened, etc.
One does not “loose” their car keys; an unsuccessful person is not a “looser.” If you use that word to describe such a person, that makes YOU a --what for it-- LOSER!
I just see this EVERYWHERE, even on the SDMB! Is knowledge of the English language completely dead?!
Forget it. It’s a loost cause.
What do you expect? You and I were educated normally, but these people were apparently “otherwise-educated.” We should be happy that they can read and write at all.
I can’t think of a clever joke, but I believe you yourself may have used the wrong word [del]hear[/del] here.
I believe you mean “one’s” car keys.
Mayo
Yeah, its irritating, and teh rant comes up fairly often hear on the bords.
Nothing too loose yer shit over tho…
Sometimes I loose my place when I’m whating in line.
I blame Beyonce.
…
BTW It just occurred to me that, if you got that joke, you should kill yourself now. I’m in - who’s with me? Damn you, infernal omniprescent media!
It’s definately time to put the breaks on “loose”.
(How many people on this board have to break their cars before the manufacturers do something about those faulty brakes, anyway?)
I here about people who loose there breaks going down steep mountain roads.
Yeah, its bad.
Nitpick: “To loose,” Lautrec, also has a transitive meaning, something like "to release from confinement or restraint: “Cry havoc, and loose the dogs of war!” Colloquial English usually uses “to let loose” instead.
Other than that, excellent rant on a minor but annoying quasi-homonym error.
Why does everything have to be about the gays?
My favourite is ‘there’. ‘their’ and ‘they’re’. The last job I worked at, every message I ever got for 2 years from co-workers, supervisors,managers, the only spelling I saw was ‘there’.
It was like they had all decided that there is no other spelling. I got messages like “I went there to see Bob and Jane and there playing with there son there.”
It is a lost battle.
I don’t know. I LIKE the fact that certain people identify their lack of brain-capacity, work-ethic, perfectionism, attention to detail (or whatever the underlying cause of poor spelling turns out to be) and put that lack on display for God and everyone to view and to judge.
When I’m hiring English professors, for example (something I do with increasing frequency), it’s so helpful of candidates to weed themselves out for me on their cover letter. Misspelling a single word on a cover letter speaks as eloquently as signing and notorizing a statement like “I am a slacker with low standards of perfectionism and I don’t really want this job badly enough to spend a few minutes proofreading this letter. Please do not hire me.”
Of course I’ve let a few typoes slip by me in cover letters from time to time, and I wasn’t hired for those jobs, quite properly. And my typoes on the Straight Dope are too numerous to count. But I’m not looking for your approval here either. Job seekers are, and they don’t get mine.
In a larger sense, of course, this also justifies all sorts of nit-picking grammatical rules that certain people feel they are exempt from following. Fine, whatever, just not on my watch, and thank you for self-identifying as someone who will never get to take part of my watch.
“let slip the dogs of War”
I use the term loosley 
You know what drives ME crazy?
“Breath” and “breathe”.
BREATHE is a verb, and means " to draw air into and expel it from the lungs".
BREATH is a noun, and is, in fact, the very air one draws into one’s lungs when BREATHING.
“I forgot to breath when I realized I had nothing to loose” would be an example of this annoying issue. 
Dammit, where have those dogs of war gotten to? This is the third time this month I’ve lost them.
My nettle is its/it’s, but that really can be difficult sometimes. As a former (thank goodness!) copy editor, even I have been known to flub that one on occasion.
Reading the answer here on the SDMB about 50 gazillion times has got that one (finally) stuck in my memory. Now if only someone would start a rant about whose/who’s, I could dye a happy man.
No need to loose your mind over such a minor thing.
I blame the English language moreso than the writers/speakers. Too many words sound too much alike. I hate words that are spelled differently and are pronouced differently, but are still easy to mix up (and make people laugh at you when you say them “wrong”, making you blush with embarrassment), like “pen” and “pin”, “will” and “wheel”, and “bury” and “berry”. Equally detestable are those words that you confuse only when you write them, even though their spellings are vastly different, like “they’re” and “their”, “our” and “are”, “wear” and “where”, and “die” and “dye”. So please save some of your vitriol for the words themselves.
I guess I’m not bothered when people write “loose” when they mean “lose” because I myself have made had similar blunders. Funny, you never find math- lovers pitting people for their lazy mistakes, yet I’m sure most of us would do quite poorly on a basic arithmetic test. I suppose having a weakness in mathematics is more acceptable than a weakness in language…perhaps the educated elite is a bit biased against more right-brained folks. I dunno. I consider myself a champion of verbosity, but I actively dislike grammarians and spelling fiends. They remind me of those kids in school who always get straight As on their exams, but never have good ideas when you’re saddled with them in group projects. Nor do they know how to cut up when the teacher isn’t in the room.
You will always find me posting to threads like this one, because I enjoy being the lone voice who says “Get a life”.
I am 83 years old and for at least 65 of those years I had the word “emnity” in my volcabulary-until I saw it spelled “enmity” on SDMB.
“Aha,” thought I, a flaw, and I was about to leap on it.
But discretion overcame me and I looked it up (One in a million shot, doc, one in a million.).
It’s amazing how you decide on something and then keep agreeing with youself, oblivious to the fact that you might just possibly be wrong.
I’m bothered by it, and by Carlyjay’s “breath”/“breathe” thing, among others, because the two words sound different. So when I’m reading something where someone used the wrong word/spelling, I hear that wrong word in my head, and it sounds really jarring, like somebody hitting an obviously wrong note in a song.