Grammar Nazi that I am, as undone as I can be over things like less vs. fewer, “continue on” (ugh, even typing it in quotes make me shudder like I’m gonna hurl) the long past rectifying extreme uniqueness of it all, and so forth, all of it pales, fades, disappears from view when the horror that is “would of” rears its thoroughly alarming head.
I’m sure it’s just me, I’m sure others consider it a perfectly harmless homonym spelling issue, but I can’t write it off that easily, I won’t. The sloppy thinking that underlies the error disturbs me too much. Why, you may ask?
Because “would of” is a completely meaningless phrase.
Unless you insert a comma, which stops it from being a true phrase at all and turns it into two words next to each other separated by a comma (i.e.: He would, of course, desire to kill people who wrote this, but he refrained."
What makes this even less tolerable in the modern world we live in is the fact that, to a far greater degree than ever before in human history, an enormous number of us spend our days reading and writing all day long, not only for work, but for play. It’s what we do more than anything else. The fact that so much of it, especially with younger people, is actually the shorthand of IM and Twitter is no excuse.
Clean it up, goddamn it! Have some fucking respect! Sloppy language = sloppy communication = sloppy thinking = the breakdown of human society and the end of life on earth.
Here’s the killer, though. When I tried to complain to a friend, on the grounds that it’s a writing error, she slapped me with the prescriptivist label. She claims she’s honestly and truly heard people enunciating “would of” in her time at a call center as opposed to “would’ve”, which makes the construction correct.
I try not talk to her about language stuff any more. I consider myself a linguist and am fairly tolerant about new evolution in language, but this is an abomination.
It took me a second to realize that would of = would’ve. I’ve probably seen if before and inserted the correct homophone but when its set aside like that it really hurts my brain.
Would’ve is perfectly fine, although I give it the stinkeye for being the vehicle that introduced the horror of would of to the English-speaking world.
Yup. That way I only get annoyed when they *write *“would of”.
Hijack:
I am profoundly disturbed by the commercial I saw the other day for Northeastern University featuring the caption “APPRECIATING OUR DIFFERANCES”.
Also, there was a print ad all over the MBTA a few months ago for Harvard Extension that was punctuated so badly it gave me a rage migraine every time I saw it.
Never phased me… a much more logically understandable construction. The mental process is easy to follow: yes, someone put the bag on the table, so someone should take it off the table. BUT… what if someone put the bag “on top of” the table? Or on top of the fridge, on top of the TV, on top of the box. It’s logical to then take it off of the fridge, etc.
This drives me NUTS. I don’t care about the spoken bit - people have accents and that’s ok - but when I see people writing "would of"or “could of” or “should of” I literally have to sit on my hands to not correct them.