The Oxford English dictionary should add "could of"

[DyslexicScientist]

Everyone knows what it means, and quite a lot of people use it. Just seems very stuffy to not add it. English is an adaptive language.

They've already added omg and a smiliey face was the word of the year. So they are not adverse to change.

But it's clearly not always a preposition! If it were, the phrase "would of" wouldn't exist! I don't think that there's any real argument for using this form in written English, but to say that it doesn't mean anything is just factually inaccurate. "I would of" is used by many native English speakers and understood by all native British English speakers. If someone says to you "I would of gone if I'da had the chance" you will have no trouble parsing this. If you hear the words "I would to gone if I in had the chance" you will have trouble.

Turning a preposition into a verb would be like grammatical alchemy - impossible!

It doesn't exist. People are using it because they are confusing it with 've, the correct form. It's the same as people who can't spell. If everyone started writing grammer for grammar, it would still not suddenly become correct

It is always a preposition. The error happens as "should have", for example, is generally contracted to "should've" in spoken aEnglish and is then sometimes mistakenly thought to be an 'of' not an 've and written as such.

People would still understand the meaning , though, just as they would a foreigner talking in infinitives but it would still sound clunky

And it woula not necessarily evolve as a correct form

Would

Sorry, that's like claiming Italian doesn't exist because it doesn't adhere to the rules of Latin. Language changes by mistakes and variant usages gradually becoming standard.

Hmmm. Italian is an offshoot , not just bending the rules slightly. If you learnt Italian, you would still be corrected if you made a mistake. I can see no evidence of of becoming accepted in this context in the near future . In mean, why change it when people are just hearing it wrong?

And there's a difference between mistakes, evolution and dialect

People are just writing it because they don't know how to conjugate the verb phrase

They don't understand the mechanics behind it. I mean, could you translate it into French using de as an auxiliary instead of a voir? ???

Avoir

I'm dyslexic but I managed how to use 'have' properly. It can be done.

Should of/could of gives me the shudders.

Italian is one of the languages that Latin changed into. It's an interesting case because up until quite recently Italians regarded the various Italian dialects as being essentially the same language as Latin, just that Latin was the written version (lingua scolastica) and Italian dialects the spoken version (lingua volgare). Of course at some point, the Latin venio venis venit (I come, you come, he comes) became the Italian vengo vieni viene. Initially, the latter forms would have been non-standard and ungrammatical, not fit to be written down, etc. But now they're simply the standard forms.

Ok. So perhaps in French we could say for Vous auriez quitté le bureau(you would have left the office ),Vous de quitté le bureau, with de translating of????:I know it's French but, being a fellow Indo European language, it shares many grammatical features with English. Italian shares some features with Latin but, oddly, German retained a number of its rules so I am not sure I'd use Italian vs Latin as a comparison

Well French is an interesting example regarding differences between spoken and written language! Grammatical declension that is observed in writing is in many cases not to be heard in speaking. And regarding auxiliaries - you find that lots of native speakers don't observe the etre/avoir distinction, instead preferring avoir for verbs like tomber and renter (though keeping it for aller and venir - more 'obvious' movement verbs I think). So it seems that the meaning of the verb is pretty arbitrary. Ne pas is interesting in French too -- "pas" means "step" so "ne..pas" means "not... a step" - which obviously doesn't really mean anything. And now people often drop the "ne" and so just say "pas" to negate the verb. So the arbitrariness of clitics can be seen in French too for sure!

*rentrer

And Italian doesn't simply "share some features" with classical Latin. It's the same language, 2,000 years later. German doesn't come from Latin, Latinate and Germanic languages are siblings. www.linguatics.com/images/indoeuro02c.jpg

It can't possibly go into a dictionary. For that to work, you would have to define "of" as "have" and say that it is a verb with different tenses. But it isn't. No one says "I of", "you of" he/she/it ofs", nor do they say "We were ofing" or "They have ofed".

I haven't read the replies but JUST NO! There is absolutely no way that should have becomes should of. Just NO! It doesn't even make sense......

The OED doesn't make value judgements. It is a mirror, reflecting language as it is used.

In this particular case, the word "of" as a form of "have" is in the OED already, and the supporting quotations show it has been in use since at least the eighteenth century.

Whether it's right or wrong grammatically is another debate entirely, that has no place in the OED, and would not have any weight in an argument against it being included. If there is evidence of usage, it's in.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I hate it, just because people say it - it would be like adding pacific as an alternative to specific.

I hate the incorrect placement of commas.

Fair gives me the rage.

You could add "you was" at the same time on the same basis. We would all know it was wrong adn those who used it were not well educated. It would still mean you were derided by others and not get some jobs and you'd fail the posh test for jobs but go forth and use it if you want to.