If It's Loose, Don't Lose It

Lots of things irritate me, on account of how I am easily irritated. Most of all, I am irritated by stupidity, especially stupidity caused by lack of attention to obvious detail.

No more is this demonstrated than in my total aversion to the misuse of words and one thing that really drives me insane is the inability to differentiate between "lose" and "loose". Why do so many people get these confused? It should be obvious from the pronunciation alone what they both mean, yet so many people insist that they are going to, for example, "loose their mind" ... what does that mean exactly, that they are going to send it on some sort of rampage?

Let's get this straight once and for all. When the word "loose" is pronounced, it has an "s" sound; when the word "lose" is pronounced, it has a "z" sound. If that simple difference is borne in mind, there should be no margin for error and no excuse for it. To make it even clearer, "loose" is the opposite of "tight" and "lose" is the opposite of "win". So, if you say "I know I am going to loose the game", what you are really saying is "I know I am not going to tight the game", which makes no sense whatsoever. It also makes you sound like a complete idiot.

Oh and while we're at it, the words "to" and "too" are pronounced differently, too (not to). So, you would "go to work, too" (light "u" sound followed by heavy "oo" sound), you would not "go too work, to", although you might "go to work to work".

Google Mood Ring (Blue): Comfortable, breezy, at rest, lovable

Unwashed Teenage Blondes

Well, for those who know what I mean, Second Life is down for updating and the Beta grid doesn't seem to be working either, so I may as well prattle in here a bit seeing as I haven't done for a while.

Perhaps I will moan about my teenage daughter for a paragraph or two. What is it about teenage daughters and clothes? Mine has like hundreds of things to wear, but yesterday she wanted to wear the one thing that hadn't been washed. Never mind that everything else was clean and dry, it just had to be the one top that she'd forgotten to give me for washing the day before.

We had far more fun during the Easter holidays, though. Her hair is naturally medium-dark brown with red highlights. Due to the fact that, like her mother, she can be a bit scatter-brained at times, the majority of her schoolfriends have told her that she should have been born blonde (she was actually dark blonde as a toddler, but it darkened). Anyway, to this end she decided to colour her hair blonde. Unfortunately, being 'blonde', she didn't make too good a job of it and ended-up with a large patch of very blonde hair on top, surrounded by reddish blonde, graduating to gingery-brown as it went further down. She did all this at her father's and he hadn't the common sense to tell her that with hair the length of hers she'd need two or three packets of colourant, not one. She did try using several others afterwards, but it didn't seem to work.

I had a similar problem when I was her age. My hair then was extremely dark brown (blue-black in some lighting), but it also had red in it. Blonde highlights were all the rage when I was about the same age my daughter is now and as my mother didn't want to pay for me to have them, I decided to try them myself. I bought myself a box of peroxide, grabbed an old toothbrush, and ... well, the end result was several huge frizzy pieces of ginger fuzz and the eventual loss of an entire head of hair that had taken me years to grow to well past the bottom of my bra strap. The hairdresser insisted the only way to solve the problem was to cut it all off to nape of the neck level (way above the bottom of my bra strap, on account of the fact that I have never worn a bra around my neck). Since then, it hasn't seemed to want to grow much past my shoulders, so goodness only knows what damage I did to it.

The upshot of this is that my daughter ended-up having to colour her hair medium-dark brown and the final count in financial terms was around £30 to get herself back to the colour she'd started with.

Google Mood Ring (Blue): Comfortable, breezy, at rest, lovable.