I'm loosing my mind - letting it loose.

Many people, close friends, well-educated, and well-meaning, use lose and loose incorrectly. More specifically, they spell loose when they mean to use lose.

Loose means, as an adjective, that something is not tight. Or, as a verb, to let something go.

Lose, on the other hand, is a verb which means to be deprived of something.

Loose rhymes with goose. It does not rhyme with choose.

Lose rhymes with bruise and with choose. It does not rhyme with nose, nor with chose.

This is all said in the best of intentions.

Visissitudes of the mind

I woke up this morning with the word avuncular floating around in my head.

The portly professor laughed in his quintessentially avuncular manner.

ASL

I'm taking an informal class on American Sign Language. The one rule is that there is no voice allowed. For an hour each Tuesday evening I exist in a semi-silent world (the only sounds being the natural ambient noises that I cannot shut out). My communication is truncated to rudimentary phrases and laborious finger-spelling. As our teacher prays (we don't close our eyes during prayer) I can comprehend generally that he is talking to our Lord and includes the class and our learning in his thanksgiving and supplication. Learning motions and signs for words makes me consider how I think - do I think in individual words or phrases? Do I hear the words in my head as I think? How does a deaf person contemplate? Do they see written words as they would when writing or typing? Do they envision signs?

After an hour, spoken words are an affront to the silence. We have labored together to communicate and at once give it all up for the ease of our native tongue. Perhaps the affront is actually guilt at the feelings of relief that I can speak once again.