Close, but no cigar: using then and than, lose and loose

It's Phonics Friday once again, and today I'm addressing two pairs of words a reader asked me to discuss. These pairs perplexed me a bit, because they aren't actually homophones. They should not be pronounced the same.

If you're currently doing so, then you have what my former choir director would call "an annunciation problem." Chances are your speech has become a bit mushy, like the speakers around you. Linguists call these regional speech patterns dialect. Since we learn to speak a language...