@CardboardBoxx: more accurately he said was relying on auto grammar check to fix his word choices. Which is lazy, illiterate, and as he found out, error prone. And yes, freshly armed with the knowledge of failure, he continues doing the same thing. Which I read as lazy, willfully ignorant, or both.
As more of these checker-things become crowd-sourced we’ll also see them increasingly unable to tell good from bad, high register from lazy and/or ignorant.
A different, albeit related, issue is the growth of people who speak to write / post rather than type. I’m part of a 7-person work group that emails within the group a few times per day. 4 of us use PCs/Macs. 3 of us read the emails on a phone and speak their replies.
The reduction in comprehension between the folks reading emails on the phone or not is stunning. The reduction in the quality of the emails sent = spoken by phone versus not is stunning2.
It’s not a good look overall. But it is the future.
I’ve lived for extended periods (i.e., years) in four different English-speaking countries. I’ve visited many places within those countries where regional accents differ. I’ve also visited a number other countries where English is the primary language, or one of the primary languages.
In every single won one of those places, “one” and “won” are homophones. And, at least in listening to the way that most people use them in everyday speech, so are “could’ve” and “could of.” About the only time when these two can be distinguished is when the person is speaking slowly enough to enunciate every separate word clearly. Then the “o” sound in “of” comes through.
I’m not doubting or contradicting your personal experience, but my rather extensive experience in English-speaking regions of the world suggests that @pulykamell is correct: in most English-speaking dialects, “could of” and “could’ve” are homphonous.
He’s been pitted for it before, but he’s got some disability going on there, so people cut him slack once they know. It does seem to me that if he can manage to type “… …”, then he should be able to type “.” Simply ending a sentence rather than having them run on indefinitely would make his posts much more readable. And if he knows where the upper case letters go, maybe he can put them there. How much of his terrible typing is due to disability and how much is due to laziness, I have no idea. He says that
I have add and cerebral palsy that is neurological and some what physical tho if you met me it would take about a week for ya to realize somethings off
although my English teacher would sympathize with y’all since she wrote in my school file " highly intelligent if he could write a sentence or complete a thought and possibly a task hed rule the world"
Honestly, as often as he tells us how smart he is, he must realize that all we have to go on is what he writes.
This is an interesting thread. It is now on it’s 265th post and the penultimate post is directly about the original topic of couldn’t of/shouldn’t of. In the interim it has covered at least the following topics:
couldn’t of/shouldn’nt of
irrregardless
it’s as a possessive
alright vs. all right and possessive s
the infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters postulate
descriptive dictionaries/linguistics
who/whom
loose/lose, flaunt/flout, hone in/home in
Jesus
cats
towing boats
semicolons
flatulence
I/me/you/we
postposed enclitics
Caeser (the drink)
red beer
needs washed
borrow vs. loan
Canadian Budweiser
Trump
the Canadian muskeg
Saskatchewan
Bugs Bunny in Albuquerque
Nebraska
Reuben sandwiches
420
pennies/shillings/pounds
the subjunctive mood
and finally back to couldn’t of/shouldn’nt of although it seems to have started off on another tangent with the last post.
Thank you for compiling that fine list! The great thing about the Pit is that nothing is ever off-topic. But you forgot to include “penultimate” in that list, and speaking of which, I disagree with you that the post you refer to is the most ultimate in the entire thread. There are many ultimater ones.
It was thinking about the last post when is started typing but then that post became the penultimate post before I finished. So I got to use penultimate in the post even though it’s not in the list. Now this post is the ultimatest.
Reading a book on early U.S. History, and it seems that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson often used “it’s” for the possessive pronoun. Was that “okay” back in 1790?
No, but the internet was not widely available back then, so the scope for criticism and mockery was limited. The Constitution itself is full of oddly placed commas (one of which is in the Second Amendment, offering tremendous opportunity for arguments and fisticuffs about its semantic implications).
I am. I merely take it for granted that it’s the same proper noun as the “Wooster” in the PG Wodehouse Jeeves stories.
Another name used in Wodehouse stories is “Featherstonhaugh” (“Stanley Featherstonhaugh Ukridge” – or sometimes “Featherstonehaugh”). There is a technical college not far from here called “Fanshawe”, and it was some years before I realized that it was a more phonetic spelling of the same name – or rather, that such a creature as a “Featherstonhaugh” actually existed.
Along with the word chuse and many random capital letters.
For extra credit: Find what is relevant to this thread in Article I, Section 10, Clause 2. (Although, and don’t think that it’s not like I don’t wish that I never didn’t have to say this is not true, I guess, at this point, anything is relevant to this thread.)
Hmm. If you are talking about the way people usually spoke the words at the time, two items at sevenpence each (2 x 7d) had a total cost of one-and-tuppence (1/2d).
After decimalisation, 7p (seven new pence) was usually contracted to ‘seven new pee’, or just ‘seven pee’. Nowadays people say ‘seven pence’, but never ‘sevenpence’.
And as another digression in this digressive thread: I haven’t used any coins at all since March 2020.
Here’s an interesting example that came to mind today
These are both fine:
“The address was wrong”
“The address was incorrect”
“He wrote the address wrong.” is much better than “He wrote the address incorrect.”
and “He wrote the address incorrectly” is much better than “He wrote the address wrongly.”
Between “He wrote the address wrong” and “He wrote the address wrongly,” the second one sounds a bit odd.
Between “He wrote the address incorrect” and “He wrote the address incorrectly” the second one sounds far better.
Why? I’m not quite sure. I think “to write an address wrong” means something like putting “1312 Mockingbird Lane” instead of “1313 Mockingbird Lane” - but “to write an address wrongly” suggests something like putting the address in the wrong place on the envelope. Thoughts?