Of

[TheChippendenSpook]

I'm feeling a bit sorry for the poor little word. It's being misused all over the place!

I keep seeing it used in place of 'have' and now it keeps being missed out of sentences altogether. I've seen 'a couple months' on here today and recently I've seen 'I need a couple weeks notice.'

I don't really have a point to this thread, I just needed to get it off my chest so feel free to ignore me

I think Daily Mail journos have spent so long trawling MN for their stories, even they've forgotten the difference between of and have! 🤦‍♀️

I am a total pedant but just accept that there's nothing to be done about it. I have to zip my lips when those around me utter the errors. A neighbour says "he's new car" and she mustn't be aware that the word is "his" so what I would like to know is what are they teaching in schools these days? Has everything changed since my own school days? 😞

It seems that ‘effect’ is the default these days, when people mean ‘affect’.

Tbh I have less of a problem with "should of" etc after someone pointed out that not everyone is lucky enough to get to read a lot and are familiar with hearing the contracted "should've". "'ve" sounds a lot more like "of" than "have" 🤷🏼‍♀️

Of / off and lose / loose can't be due to auditory processing - the consonants sound different.

'Of' instead of 'have' is due to the extensive use of the schwa, the 'uh' sound, in English. In many contexts there is no differentiation between vowels - o and a in this case.

What do you mean by ‘lucky enough to get to read a lot’, though? No, most of our daily lives don’t involve intensive periods of communing with the classics on the sofa, but anyone can glance through a couple of headline stories on a (mostly-) literate free site like the BBC or Guardian, if they have time to go on their phones.

I appreciate that much of the poorer writing you see on a site like Mn is from people whose only contact with the written word is on social media, so they have normalised things like ‘He said he would defiantly come to pick up the Chester draws’ — because that’s all they see.

In S. England? I see it a lot.
I also see 'alot' a lot (trying to ignore 'aswell').

Not everyone grew up being encouraged to read or to engage with news stories anywhere other than Faceache or Twatter. I think that's why there's been such a marked increase in the use of "of".

Neither my in-laws or ex in-laws have books in the house other than recipe books 🤷🏼‍♀️

i assume that coming on to Pedants’ Corner and writing “prescriptive grammar pedantry really has no place here” was a joke?!

My parents weren’t literate in my childhood (taken out of school very young (12 and 13) by parents who needed their incomes) — no homework help, had to write my own sick notes, no books in the house whatsoever, a strong encouragement to leave school as soon as I legally could. I had to find my way to the library and join (having decided to ignore my parents who said it would ‘cost money’ and was ‘only for rich people’, which was also what they said about university.).

I assume that poster was making the point that there are different ‘standard Englishes’ for different English-speaking cultures.

That's brilliant. Well done 😊 My mum is pretty much self taught too.

Please recognise that not everyone has that ability though. How wonderful it would be if everyone could!

Thanks, that’s kind. I don’t have any special abilities, though.

My point was only that, while I needed to go out and find reading material beyond school text books, most people with a phone have access to large amounts of literate writing at their fingertips. As well as the defiant Chester draws stream of consciousness stuff. The problem, I suppose, is distinguishing between the two.

I think a lot of people do know how to make that distinction, but when writing on somewhere like MN they don't - it's conversational and informal, so there's no need to go googling every phrase. As long as the meaning is clear, the post has done its job and on to the next one.

Very different to formal communication at work, say, where people will take a bit more care, including looking up terms they're unsure of.

And of course, not everyone has the education or ability to do so either.

Isn’t that what ultimately ends up getting rolled out to justify half of the things that get picked up on Pedants’ Corner - that the “error” is actually “regional usage” or that the mistake has become so embedded that it is pointless pushing back any more!

Anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language will know that using the correct tense is one of the things you have to grapple with. I’d be interested to know how Scottish teachers (for example) would approach the use of tenses in English (particularly when teaching English as a foreign language). Do they teach correct use of the past participle whilst ignoring it in their own speech, or would they teach this regional use as being correct?

I correct such mistakes when my children make them in texts. Oh how they must love me 😂
I know language evolves but my adult dc used to speak and spell so much better when they were young children.
I think it makes people seem a bit thick even though that surely cannot be the case for all of them using of for have?

I saw that! I know the Mail isn’t exactly a bastion of quality, but that’s such a basic grammar error, I it makes me wonder about the half-wits they employ.

I was a child of the sixties and we were never taught English grammar, in fact I think I believed it was a specifically French thing since we were taught French grammar quite early! We were made to read a lot, and were supposed to absorb concepts I think by using what we read. I don’t remember my use of English ever being corrected at school although spelling was definitely a thing. We would never have got away with Chester draws for example, nor would we have used it because we would have read the correct version.

My partner isn’t English and he often asks me to clarify what is correct and all I can tell him is that it is x because it sounds right!

I'm not talking about regional differences, I mean that standard Hiberno-English, for instance, differs from US English.

This drives me nuts. Iv instead of I've is another terrible one.

Been as/seen as instead of being as/seeing as. Someone up thread said it's down to auditory processing and I agree; I hear "bein' as" but I KNOW how to spell it. It's not down to dyslexia in every instance. Alex Scott for example would say this but I bet she wouldn't write it.

And missing out "the" ie "sat on patio in sun all day with wine and went in pool"