A while back I was a little too hard on myself for some errors. I shouldn’t say that I like being wrong, but I’m OK with it sometimes. If I’ve made a really weak argument and someone challenges it, then I can rework it and have something stronger next time. If I make a factual error and someone corrects me then I learn and so does everybody else (unless I was the only one who had it wrong). However, sometimes being wrong just costs credibility or can be a source of annoyance for readers.

As it turns out, for six weeks now, I have been using the wrong word. A reader contacted me today to point out that while I have been meaning to refer to “losing faith” I kept on saying “loosing faith.” Thank you very much for this much needed correction. While I am all for loosening people’s faith, that isn’t what I was writing about. I’ve just gone through the archives and fixed this.

You would think I wouldn’t make a mistake like that since I took two years of Greek and when we were learning conjugations we would use the root of “luo” the first person active present tense for “to loose.”

I often try to blame misuse of vowels on studying Hebrew and Arabic. Semitic languages don’t actually have vowels, at least not written ones, but they get added to the text to help Westerners who can’t live without them. Since they’re artificial additions, they are very fluid and loosely used. It really messed me up for a few years, and I don’t think I’ve completely recovered. The truth is, my spelling sucks. Spell check saves me, except for in the title (which isn’t spell checked) or when I’m correctly spelling the wrong word.

Please, if I’m wrong, let me know so I don’t continue to make an ass of myself. I’m an atheist blogger so I’m already an ass by default.