I'm loosing my mind! That's right, I'm going to set it free to run around for awhile....

OK, here's one of my pet peeves.... I'm not the world's best speller by any means, although I usually know when a word looks wrong and have the sense to look it up in a dictionary. And if I'm not the official king of typos thanks to my fat fingers, at least I'm a member of the royal family. Sometimes my fingers just get typing faster than my brain can keep up, or vice versa, and I make stupid mistakes like putting "it's" instead of "its" or "they're" instead of "their" even though I know better.

These are always isolated incidents, though, and I never make the same mistake twice in a row. What I can't understand, though, are people who consistently use "loose" instead of "lose". And by consistently I mean every time they write it, often multiple times in a single paragraph. We're not talking about confusion over punctuation here (I'll admit that the whole "its/it's" thing doesn't make a whole lot of sense); we're talking about two completely different words, folks!

Look, the word "lose" means to be unable to find, to fail to retain possession of, or to fail to win. You can lose a game, lose your marbles, or lose your mind. "Loose," however, means to untie or to set free. The only way you can "loose" a game is if the game in question is a deer you were planning to kill and you decided to let it go instead. I have no idea how people can confuse these two words, and I'm constantly dismayed when I see it happen.

And, while I'm at it, can people please stop justifying the use of the phrase "I could care less" instead of the correct "I couldn't care less" on grounds that the the speaker is "just being ironic"? It's not irony, people! Irony would be if the person actually knew what the correct phrase was and conciously chose to mangle it for humorous effect. Like, for example, when I say, "We'll just have to burn that bridge behind us" instead of "We'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it." I mean, come on -- "I could care less" isn't even funny! Why on earth would people say that in an attempt to be funny if it isn't, in fact, even remotely humorous? The whole point of "I couldn't care less" is to indicate that you care so little about something that you couldn't possibly care any less about it (in other words, that you don't care at all). What is "I could care less" supposed to mean? That you do, in fact care to some degree? What's the point? Where's the humor?

No, no, I'm afraid the answer is very simple. People are idiots. OK, so maybe not everybody. And maybe there are, in fact, a few die-hard irons (hey -- if a burglar commits burglary and a robber commits robbery, that means that someone who commits irony is an iron, right?) out there who purposely mangle the phrase in an attempt to be witty, but I'm convinced down to the very core of my being that the vast majority of people who say "I could care less" do so because they honestly, truly believe that what their saying actually makes sense instead of just being total nonsensical gibberish.

Ok, just one more thing, and then I'm done ranting for today, I promise. Will anybody who thinks that the word "nonplus" means something akin to "unaffected" or "not surprised in the least bit" please do the English speaking world a favor and look it up in a dictionary? As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, "That word you keep using -- I do not think it means what you think it means...."