“…is comprised of…” (e.g. “The USA is comprised of 50 states.”)
No, no, no. The USA is composed of 50 states. Fifty states comprise the USA. There is no correct grammar situation for “is comprised of.”
Also, whenever someone writes “Bare with me,” I’m always tempted to reply, “Okay, I’m naked…now what?”
Also, “brakes” vs. “breaks”. I swear somewhere once I read: “What should I do if my car breaks brake?”
I really don’t know why it is so hard to understand how people make this mistake. The pronunciation and spelling of “loose” and “lose” is silly and has no rationale.
The only way to know how to spell and pronounce them is by rote. There are no indicators within the words as to whether the “s” is to be pronounced “sss” or “zzz”. The middle vowels are a single “o” in one word and a double “o” in the other yet are pronounced the same. And as if that isn’t enough “lose” is pronounced with a long “o” sound even though that is usually associated with a double “o” not a single “o”.
The answer to the question posed by the OP is “because English is fucked up, man”
I could also “advise” people to consider the spelling when they want “advice”.
I get the past and passive lay and laid and lie and lying mixed up all the time.
It comes up a lot because I’m a fiction writer.
[QUOTE=Princhester]
The only way to know how to spell and pronounce them is by rote.
[/QUOTE]
That’s true of everything in English, yes?
I enjoyed studying Spanish for this reason. Letters only ever have one sound, and those letters are only ever pronounced in a certain way. You never look at a word in Spanish and have to guess how to pronounce it.
I feel deeply for people trying to learn English as a second language. It is utterly insane.
You want to see some absolute doozies, you should try grading the writing assignments of college freshmen. And it’s not just some of the basic word confusion that we’re talking about here, although there’s plenty of that. A lot of it, i think, is related to MoonMoon’s point about hearing language versus seeing it. The way my students use some terms, it is clear that they have only ever heard them spoken out loud, and have never encountered them in print.
Here’s one i got in a student paper a while back. It was a new one on me:
So, first, this student doesn’t know the term “quote unquote” (or “quote end quote,” depending on which idiom you prefer).
And, more importantly, she doesn’t understand that verbalizing the words “quote unquote” is actually designed to stand in for quotation marks, and that doing it in written form, when you are actually using quotation marks, is redundant.
A lot of my students are also attuned to look for cases where writers betray their prejudices or their personal preferences or perspectives. Unfortunately, in describing these cases, the students often have no idea about how to use the word “bias.” They will talk about how a particular writer is “bias” against something, or about how there is “biased” in this particular document. Many also seem unaware of the difference between “incidence” and “incidents.”
It’s a bit more complicated than that (some phonetic correspondences work at the syllable level; some consonant phonemes change between dialects; the letter X should be taken out back and shot), but thank you 
Insure/ensure/assure. Getting emails from Quality Assurance talking about insuring quality makes me particularly grumpy.
The old puzzler about using just the four homophones of “right” in a gammeringly correct sentence.
Write “rite” right, Wright !
Reminds me of a newspaper headline I saw once, with the word “catastrophy.”
Sale vs Sell.
I need to sale this truck.
Truck for sell.
Drives me nuts!
No. It’s true all too often, but there are some elements of English that tend to be consistent. “Lose” vs “Loose” is a three way clusterfuck.
These are among the accepted exceptions to the apostrophe rule also noted would be multiple single letters like A’s not to be confused with the word “as.”
tend to be. Even the things that tend to be consistent only tend. I know how it got to be that way, but damn.
I suspect many are like me on this topic.
Folks who misuse my easy ones (lose/loose, affect/effect, etc.) are morons.
Those who nitpick over my tough ones (who/whom) need to get a life.
mmm
I can’t let this conversation go by without mentioning my personal favorite (not!)
grisly vs. grizzly
grisly murder. grizzly bear.
“accepted exceptions”
I saw what you did there. 
People who rant and rave about a particular subject. These things are more or less opposites. You can rant about something you hate, or rave about something you love, but to do both about the same thing is crazy.
To rant and *rail *about a subject makes much more sense.
I disagree.
“Rant and rave” is generally used in an effort to suggest that someone’s behavior might not be completely rational. This fits perfectly well will the original definition of “rave,” which was related to showing signs of madness or delirium, or acting in a wild and incoherent manner. I still hear the term “to rave like a madman” occasionally. And the second definition in the OED also says that rave can be used to describe exclamations for or against something.
Rave as a verb for enthusiastic admiration (“she raved about the restaurant they visited”) is probably more common now, but that doesn’t mean that “rant and rave” is incorrect or poor usage.
Exactly. See: raving lunatic
I wish I could edit the sign over a local store: “TWO COUSIN’S BEAUTY SUPPLY”. Every time I drive past, I have to stare, as at a bad accident.