>>These days it seems in print you see the tortuous "more well-known" and "most well-known" instead of "better-known" and "best-known".
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>>Also, a new tipping point. With the exception of large advertising campaigns (where mistakes would bring ridicule and be expensive to fix), it seems that "its" and "it's" are used improperly more than half the time. The other day I saw a single sentence that contained both "its" and "it's", and was dumbfounded that both instances were correct - it's that rare these days. Far more common in that circumstance is for the writer to get them both wrong.
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>I have noticed that the verb "lose" is written "loose" more and more, especially by people who speaks English natively. (Funny, at first I forgot the "t", and wrote "naively".)

That last one is easy to understand. The "o" in "lose" is pronounced as if it were "oo"; by normal English rules, "lose" should be pronounced with a long "o," to rhyme with "blows" and "flows." But yeah, people should have learned it in school.

As for its and it's, oddly, it took me a long time to not have to think about which to use. What finally clicked for me was that the possessive "its" is analogous to "his" and "hers."

Tamar