It’s time for another grammar rant, to go with my “it’s vs. its” harangue. But this time we will deal with “who’s” and “whose.”

On the face of it there’s no reason to confuse the two—“who’s” follows the classic rule for contractions, short for “who is,” and “whose” is quite clearly the possessive form of “who.” It ought to be much easier than the distinction between “it’s” and “its,” because the it-words are spelled exactly the same except for that apostrophe, whereas the who-words are spelled differently from each other.

And yet I continue to see them used incorrectly. Who’s doing it? People whose education has been sorely lacking, that’s who.

And while I’m at it, I might as well tackle another mix-up that puzzles me just as much: the “loose/lose” confusion. There’s no apostrophe there to get in the way and cloud the brain, just straight spelling. And yet, along with “choose/chose,” mistakes are legion.

It’s not that I’m some sort of schoolmarm. But I’m puzzled by the ubiquity of certain errors, when words that seem much more difficult are seldom written incorrectly. Maybe it’s the fact that Spellcheck catches the latter and not the former, which generally involve substitutions of one common word for another. But whatever the reasons for the errors—and if you have any explanations, please offer them—let’s rededicate ourselves to the motto of this blog: