It's should have and would have not should of and would of

[pippinleaf]

That's all.

Ah. Now I understand the benefit of coming late to these threads.

suzanne's abysmal SPAG are particularly fun after the last thread.

I find it sad that people still need to be educated - surely, they should have learned these things before? - but clearly it is my duty.

People who 'know better' make mistakes on chat forums for exactly the same reasons smug pedants make mistakes. Some of their errors are typos, and they don't proof read. Some of their errors happen because they're thinking about the third word down the line and so they've accidentally switched to the homophone of the word they intended (I'd call that a typo too). Some of their errors are because Dagon the Fish God made it so, and vows to cover the world in herring scales like dripping blood in token of our grammatical doom.

HTH.

It depends on the circumstance you refer too ??

Everyday chat forums such as this...

YABVVVU - the errors you mention can simply be dialect - I say it that way because I'm from a certain part of the North East, I sometimes slip back & write it that way too & I like to see people write as they speak - it gives their posts more personality - heck, it was good enough for Catherine Cookson, Mark Twain & others.

If you mean a news article, website or more typical books...

YANBU - it gets up my nose that people earn money from writing & they can't get it right

YANBU

Drives me insane. The word "of" has no logical place in the sentence. It just doesn't make sense in the English language

"Haitch" and "pacific" give me the rage. So does "less" when "fewer" should be used. I also hear in my head 'you certainly can, the question is may you'.

I'm a lost cause but I only correct DH on the less/fewer thing, fortunately he doesn't do the others. I really try not to but I can't help it.

"It depends on the circumstance you refer too??"

Are all those mistakes deliberate?

Oh yes, LittleBear, don't get me started on supermarkets with a, "10 items or less," checkout! Makes my teeth curl!

apparently it's 10 items or fewer at Waitrose

Nope

dodgy autocorrect, migraine eyes, no sleep, major stress going on here & dosed up to the eyeballs on strong pain medication

but as it is a chat forum & people here deal with all kids of life challenges & nit picking like this is nothing short of damn right unkind

I rest my case

"10 items or less" is OK.

Split infinitives are a perfectly natural trait of the English language. They are not split. They are instances of interesting/flowery/descriptive language, and we should enjoy the fact that we speak a language with such exemplary provision for description.

English that can be easily translated into Latin is not the same thing as lively, interesting, authentic English.

I always assume if people actually knew it was could have and should have they would naturally use it, being on a chat forum is a daft excuse. My grammar/spelling is not perfect and often I type too quickly so mistype and on MN this would not worry me at all really but bad grammar does irritate me, I can't help it.

Seeing stationary instead of stationery really gets on my nerves, there is a local card and stationery shop and the sign says stationary!!

BTW I think it is awful to correct people on their spelling or grammar on MN when they are posting about a serious subject, I have seen this many times and is really unfair.

But that's ignorance, zany. Excuseable, perhaps, but wrong.

People who know how to use 'have' have been using homophones for it, which are othographically identical with other parts of speech, for hundreds of years, since long before people thought to mass-produce grammar books about the English language.

I find with MNers you just have to say ' look i don't know how to spell xyz in this context' and people are generally pretty nice about it.

All of you who are laboring on about how obvious the difference between "would of" and "would have" is, are you willfully missing the posts pointing out that it is "would of" and "would've" that are being confused? Also in some accents, it is a function of the words being elided. Do you carefully enunciate "would have" or do you elide it in your accent? In mine, it's almost always elided.

And what Jeanne said.

Should of" and "would of" are pet hates of mine. They irk me, although I don't usually say anything about it

Same here, they make me cringe, as do a lot of the others mentioned upthread.

If someone says or writes could of and should of, rightly or wrongly I assume they are thick, because it's self evident that they are spouting something that makes no sense. If someone wants me to take them seriously, in a social or business situation, they should be educated enough or perceptive enough to know the right way to express those terms. Saying you were never taught the correct way is a cop-out. Think about what you say and what you mean.

I'll see your saink and raise you a somet, I thought the spelling was rather creative considering the already popular use of summat and the lesser known sunnink

Ugh. All these mistakes turn me puce with rage.

If you understand it enough to correct it, it doesn't really need correcting though does it?

A message is not less important or worthwhile if it contains spelling or grammar mistakes.

A person is not less valuable or worthwhile if they make spelling or grammar mistakes (corrects the third fourth fifth typo).

It is utterly important that people who find spelling or grammar more tricky, either because of a specific learning difficulty such as dyslexia, going to school during the period when grammar was not explicitly taught, or because it is just quite tricky sometimes, are supported.

A lot of the time, we learn from what we see. Of course it doesn't matter on a forum if we write "would of" instead of "would have". But it matters enormously in a job application, and if we are used to seeing "would of" on the forum we read all the time, often, that is what will stick in our heads and make it on to the paper.

YANBU OP!

And for someone who claims not to give a shit about this sort of thing, usualsuspect333 sure does like commenting on these things! Strange.

I'm 22 and have been making this mistake my whole life. Not a single person (including teachers at school) have ever pulled me up on it and I had never given it much thought so I didn't realise it was wrong.

It was actually a MNer that pointed it out to me by saying ' its have! Have fucking have!!!' if I remember correctly.

jelly you had shit English teachers then.

I would never correct anything on MN unless it is a thread about language and someone asks me.

I sometimes am nice enough to make the same mistake back to make the person feel at home, but not if they annoy me .

I enjoy language so I get pleasure out of seeing it in action, and when it goes wrong it is like watching a machine crashing its gears. But I keep my wincing to myself.

You look more of a twat correcting a mistake than you do making one.

pippin - YANBU. It drives me mad when people write this. Thank you for pointing it out.