Grammar Workshop: On Loathing the Misuse of Loath

by Jennie Ruby

I was reading an economics book on my Kindle the other day (yes, I know, how many ways at once can one person be a nerd), and noticed the word loath incorrectly spelled loathe. The strange thing was that I remembered the same writer using that word correctly earlier in the book.

Now one advantage of the Kindle over a printed book is the word search feature, so I was able to locate the examples. Here are four excerpts from the book. Can you tell which ones are correct?

1. "Even those who laud the effects of highly competitive markets are loathe to experience them personally..."
   
   
2. "...was a risk that growers were loath to assume..."
   
   
3. "...and many were loathe to do so..."
   
   
4. "Chinese producers are loath to waste cotton..."

Here's the deal: loath is an adjective meaning "unwilling to do something contrary to one's ways of thinking" (Merriam-Webster OnLine). Loathe is a verb meaning "to dislike greatly and often with disgust or intolerance."

Answers: Samples 2 and 4 are correct. Samples 1 and 3 are incorrect.

A memory aid I find helpful is to compare these words with similar words that are easier to distinguish: breath (noun) vs. breathe (verb) and cloth (noun) vs. clothe (verb). The ones with the e on the end are the verbs, and the same is true of loathe.

Note: The quotations are from The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli. I blame the editors and proofreaders for this oversight; the writer did an excellent job.

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About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

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Join Jennie in our online classes (she'll be teaching two upcoming classes for IconLogic): Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Editing with Microsoft Word 2007.

Comments

[Mark]

Thanks Jennie!

I had begun to worry that the good grammar I learned in junior high school had fallen out of use and favor. The practice you cited stood out for me. There are also some semantic practices in technical writing that were once unthinkably wrong but that seem to have gained currency. I'm thinking of the word "display" in an intransitive sense where once we would have used "appear." To this day, I can only think of mating behavior when I read that "The so-and-so window displays." Another newly emerging trend has been to use "speed" - without the particle "up" - to mean "accelerate," as in "Simulations will be used to speed learning." I cannot find a dictionary that displays that definition, though the IT revolution seems to have accelerated its acceptance in business settings.