I have a somewhat respectable day job in which I’m supposed to oversee a couple dozen highly experienced writers. In the past week, two different writers have sent me emails containing a sentence like the following:
I am loathe to make any changes to the content at this late date.
I generally don’t like pointing out mistakes in emails. We’re always writing fast; we don’t don’t have time to go back and edit what we’ve written. But for some reason I decided to point out to one of the writers that the word she should have used was loath. She responded:
I’m so sorry! I thought both words were one in the same.
One in the same! I started to get a pit in my stomach. Was the language changing without my even noticing? Or should I start getting more persnickety about emails?
