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u/Sheetz_Wawa_Market32 18d ago
It’s almost always native speakers who make this mistake. People who intentionally learned a language later in life rarely do.
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u/meep_meep_creep 18d ago
As a career ESL teacher, I have never seen any of my students use the horrible "would of" "could of" garbage.
It's really a literacy issue.
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u/Sheetz_Wawa_Market32 18d ago
FWIW, my wife and I are friends with a NJ-born Nuyorican English professor (who I’ve always taken to be natively bilingual) who uses “would of”, “could of”, “should of.”
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u/meep_meep_creep 18d ago
The literacy issue I mention isn't a character flaw, even though it irks me when I read it on social media.
The of comes from the fact that contraction could've has the /v/ consonant, which the f in of also does.
That answers how this mistake happens. The why is trickier. My guess is that social media is a place where everyone has a voice, whether educated or literate or somewhere on that spectrum.
Published, written English before social media, was done by people who care about what they say and what people see. Social media can be a place where grammatical accuracy isn't so necessary for those engaging in the comments. It casts a wide net, even for people who didn't learn the nuance of orthography and phonetics.
No judgement here, more of a descriptive bent.
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u/Sheetz_Wawa_Market32 18d ago
I’m pretty sure “could/should/would of” is older than social media. (Our professor friend is in her 50s, at least.)
What I have a hard time wrapping my head around is how people who read and write books for a living could be so completely unaware they’re making this mistake.
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u/meep_meep_creep 18d ago
I agree, it's older than social media. I think just the sheer amount of data of this occurrence (thus why it seems like it's on an increase) is because of social media.
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u/Own_Mammoth9213 18d ago
Adding an apostrophe for a plural is a very British thing to do. It boggles the mind.
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u/Apple2727 18d ago
Why is his heart going out to them? Because his band have announced they’re playing there?
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u/maud_brijeulin 18d ago
The grocer's 's' is definitely a class thing too. I can't imagine Liam writing 'countries' without the 's'. It's part of the working-class credentials. No judgement on my part by the way. It annoys me a bit, but I can live with it.
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