In a comment to my blogpost about the founding of the Campaign to Losen Standards, Hawkeye writes:
Guilty as charged (several times over). Knowing this doesn’t help much. All an offender can do is try his best to reduce it. It will never go away.
This is true. But why should the offender try to reduce it? Help is at hand from the CLS. We shall mitigate the linguistic impact of all these double-o’s with out own single-o’s. And to accomplish this we shall use one of the great innovations of the modern environmental movement – marrying markets and pollution reduction.
Just as people who fly in private jets can buy carbon offsets to make up for all the CO2 they’re emitting, people who feel guilty about repeatedly turning ‘lose’ into ‘loose’ can buy offsets from the CLS. For every offset they purchase, the CLS will restore the balance of ‘o’s in the world by publishing a blogpost in which ‘loose’ is turned into ‘lose’.
The number of offsets to be purchased will depend on the readership of the original error. So very few offsets for a blogpost, more offsets for a news ticker, and even more for a newspaper article. Details of exactly how many offsets will be worked out through intensive modeling by quants who worked for investment banks and can now be hired for cheap.
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Ideally, the CLS should act only as a regulatory body, providing a forum for demand and supply sides of o-offsets to meet, and setting standards for sale and purchase of offsets/credits, based on the context and medium.
Btw, i think txt-speak users/blog commenters need to be considered, since they also drop vowels, including, obviously, o.
This seems to expensive and to much work. A pretense of trying to reduce it is far more easy.
To add: Many CEOs thought Carbon offsets allowed them to add 0s in their account books.
The ’cause’ that makes people add an ‘o’ to lose will also induce them to abuse the CLS offsets and drop ‘o’ rather lavishly in other words. It is a beast. You cannot control it with incentives.
Namy – surely the txt spk/blog commenters are more than balanced by a certain type of enthusiastic (usually female) internet user?
Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Your kid/puppy/little donkey is soooooooo cuuuuteeeeeeeeeeee!!!
And so on?
@aishwarya back in those days when i used prepaid phone, and STD calls used to cost a fortune, calling up this certain woman was such a disaster. everytime i called her i’d hang up in say 1 minute 3 seconds (and get charged for 2 cals). and out of that 1 minute 3 seconds, 5 seconds was a “hiiiiiiiiiiiiii” and 5 seconds was a “byeeeeeeeeeeeeee”
recently i called up her dad for some stuff and he also put a 5 second “hiiiiiiiiii”
Aah, finally somebody is hiring 😛 (You are hiring, aren’t you?)