YSK it's either "should have" or "should've". "Should of" is incorrect
YSK it's either "should have" or "should've". "Should of" is incorrect
Why YSK?
The first person who typed "should of" probably heard of it in real life that was meant to be "should've", they typed "should of" online and readers thought that it's grammatically correct to say "should of" which is in fact wrong and it became widespread throughout the years on Reddit.
I hope something could start to change.
I'm not a grammar nazi, but "should of" is driving me up the wall.
I know right, I know people make careless grammatical mistakes all the time, including me, which is completely fine but people outright thought that "should of" is correct and use it all the time starts to get annoying
Same! I rather see shoulda than should of.
I know, for all intensive purposes it's maddening.
That and "all of the sudden."
Not just any other sudden. It's THE sudden.
But more importantly, where do you stand on the Oxford comma?
I strongly prefer it but it's not something I feel is worth correcting someone on.
It's mandatory in a series, only. Something is only a series of there are three. Plenty of time the cadence and diction sounds like a series but isn't.
If the first two or last two are antecedent to one another, you don't need the comma. Said another way, if the first or last noun is not severed from the second, you need a serial command to indicate that.
It depends on what you're trying to say.
Don't crash to the floor. That'd hurt.
Giving my best!
Hard relate!
Nice one. Who’d’ve guessed.
I wouldn't've, that's for sure!
As a non-native speaker, that hurts !!!
Y'all're taking it too far.
😱 You are triggering my fear of more than 1 apostrophes in a word
now im wondering if this is actually gramatically correct or not
Yes, it is.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda...
It was the Victorians that decided double contractions and double negatives should be no-nos. Some nonsense about making language have rules like mathematics. Don't listen to Victorians.
Y'all'd've guessed.
(Reddit has previously informed me that y'all'd've is the winner in these complex contractions.)
lol I remember reading this on Quora
For fucks sake....
just say "F.F.S." from that point on
I’m certainly no grammar freak and English also isn’t my native language but this deives me insane… Same with your vs you’re… it’s soooo easy…
Yeah once you understand the concept it's not too crazy. But it is still crazy.
Typing "should of" is a sign of failing to understand the basics of English grammar.
Eh, it's just shifting of how written work is relfective our spoken word. It's pretty rare for me to use a stronger "ah" sound when saying "would have" most of the time defaulting to a softer schwa sound, which sounds almost exactly how how "of" sounds. English has been changing and evolving for centuries. There's even major epochs like the great vowel shift. Hell if Shakespeare were around today and making the drastic changes to the english language like he did back then he'd be crucified by internet prescriptivists for using English improperly.
If you'd like something a bit more modern, Mark Twain broke english rules all the time in his writings and he's considered one of, if not, the greatest American writers.
I'm sorry but it doesn't fully work here. 'of' phonetically should not be spelled with a 'f', so they are already using a word that is not pronounced as it is written, might as well use "would've", which removes the part that isn't pronounced as it was traditionally "ha-", but at least it's still correct.
They use 'of' because they don't understand (or pay attention to) the grammar of what they're saying.
Even as a non native speaker "should of" feels really weird to me, it just doesn't make sense. Is this a mistake English speakers do as well?
Pretty sure it's actually one of those mistakes that is made more often by native speakers than non-native speakers
It's because "should've" and "should of" are pronounced the same. It doesn't make sense because they're just writing what they hear instead of thinking "I'm using the contraction of the auxiliary verb 'have'"..
It's because you're a non native speaker. Should of is a phonetic mistake that can be traced back to repeating words you hear over and over again before you know what they actually mean
I could care less.
My in-laws and I have a Signal group where we share fun spellings and pronunciations. We call it "udder mayham." It's fun.
I could care less.
This one is popular.
udder mayham
That's an eggcorn right?
I could care more or less.
This one in particular gets my goat
Crazy thing is, it’s getting widespread acceptance, and will probably accepted as grammatically correct in a few years.
A bit like how putting "would" in a third conditional if-clause has become standard in US English ("We wouldn't have been late if we would have taken a taxi").
I know language evolves but it doesn't stop my left eye from twitching whenever I hear it.
Not until the definition of the word "of" changes. It is not a synonym for the word "have," nor will be anytime soon.
Perhaps, when speaking, accent, mush-mouthed laziness, or plain ignorance will confuse "should have" and "should of", but one is objectively correct, and one is not.
Not until the definition of the word “of” changes.
Well that's what's happening here isn't it. It's a word that is potentially gaining an additional use as a result of reanalysis. Whether it sticks around long term remains to be seen, but language is defined by usage and it's foolish to pretend there's such a thing as objectively correct. Already the use of the verb 'to have' to form the perfect in this case is quite different from it's other meanings related to 'to possess'. And that's not even getting into you describing nonstandard usage as the result of 'mush-mouthed laziness' which is a whole nother can of worms.
Given the number of offenses I see in books and magazines, I'd say that the only thing left is for the descriptivist grammarians and lexicographers to record it.
language is full of idiosyncrasies like this (my favorite is an ekename -> a nekename -> a nickname. see Wikipedia). it's perfectly conceivable that should have would be fully re-analyzed in speech like that, so the proper form of the verb to have would become of after should
Same deal with the word "Apron". It started out as napron, so people would say a napron which turned into an apron
ITT: Awful linguistics takes
Damn I should of known this
Damn, and here I thought Redditors were the only ones who couldn't detect a joke
Lmao right? This is obviously a joke
Golly, I should of known that
- Golly, eye should of noun that
shoulda
I had a professor who would use “should of” in speech, probably because he read it so much and internalized it as being correct.
Was he 12?
"Should've" and "should of" are pronounced the same, what are you talking about? There's no way you can mix them up in speech. Are you even a native English speaker?
Sorry for the late reply. He would leave a very clear space between "should" and "of" and clearly say "of" instead of "have." If you could hear it, you would know what I am talking about. Yes I am.
Shoulda coulda & woulda are all intentional uses of slang, IMO and also exceptable online discourse.
should of is probably a product of phonetic typing (those who just type the letters that match the internal audio) or when siri first launched voice typing and no one bothered to check it. Edit: Should of should've died a long time ago tbh. could do with a mini-crusade.
People writing of instead of 've is pretty well attested before Siri even existed so I doubt that has much to do with it
While it is true that "should of" etc. can easily originate from a confusion between "'ve'" and unstressed "of", which sound identical, the statement
"Should of" is incorrect
itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.
Interestingly, there seem to be at least some native English speakers who genuinely do say "should of" (with a stressed "of") sometimes. This paper for example argues that people who say "should of" really do use a grammatical construction of the form modal verb + of + past participle. One argument the author mentions is that this would also explain the words "woulda", "coulda" and "shoulda", since "of"->"a" is quite common in general (e.g. "kind of" -> "kinda"), but "'ve"->"a" basically doesn't occur elsewhere (e.g. no one says "I'a" or "you'a" instead of "I've" or "you've"). Another is that the reverse mistake, i.e. using "'ve'" in place of "of" (e.g. "kind've"), is much rarer, which is a clear difference to e.g. the situation with "they're"/"their"/"there", where people use these words in place of the others in all combinations frequently. I recommend this blog article for a much longer discussion.
Also, whether genuine mistake (which it almost certainly is in many cases, although probably not all) or different grammatical construction, YSK that "should of" etc. didn't just become popular recently, but have been used for centuries. E.g. John Keats wrote in a letter in 1814: "Had I known of your illness I should not of written in such fiery phrase in my first Letter.". Many more examples (some older as well) can be found e.g. here or here.
TL;DR: While in many cases "should of" etc. can well be a mistake, originating from the fact that it sounds identical to "should've" when unstressed, there is some interesting linguistic evidence that at least in some dialects of English native speakers really do say "should of" etc. (i.e. in those cases it is not a mistake, merely non-standard/dialectal).
Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?
Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?
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I of heard that story before.
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Diane of already gone.
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John ofn't phoned, of he?
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I ofn't visited London before.
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Of you seen Roz?
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Of she been invited?
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They still ofn't of any news when I spoke to them yesterday.
I don't know man, Oxford Dictionary (click Grammar Point to expand) says that https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/have_2
A common mistake is to write ‘could of’ instead of could have or could've
I could of told you that.I could've told you that.
The reason for the mistake is that the pronunciation of ’ve is the same as that of of when it is not stressed. This is a common error but it is definitely considered wrong in standard English.
I don’t know man, Oxford Dictionary ...
Tells us what's popular; sometimes also what happens to be correct.
Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?
Yes.
Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?
No, because you constructed them by merely replacing the verb "have" by the preposition "of" in situations which have nothing to do with "of" after "should"/"would"/"could". I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, since neither I nor the people I cited ever claimed that this should work in the first place. The claim of in particular the author of the first paper I cited is that for some speakers there seems to be a novel construction modal verb + "of" + past participle, not that the preposition "of" has the same function as "have" in this case or in any other (in this case, the novel construction as a whole would have more or less, but not entirely the same function as modal verb + "have" + past participle, but "of" would still be just a preposition).
I don't know man, Oxford Dictionary (click Grammar Point to expand) says that [...] it is definitely considered wrong in standard English.
Yes, it certainly is considered wrong in standard English, but the interesting thing is that in some non-standard dialects there might be genuinely a novel grammatical construction which actually uses the preposition "of". I mean, you don't need to find that interesting, but I do. And if that is indeed the case, it would mean that the speakers of those dialects are not making a purely orthographic mistake like when people confuse "they're" and "their", for example, but are rather speaking or typing in their dialect.
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"Should of" is grammatically incorrect, regardless of whether the user/speaker is aware of its incorrectness. It's a fact, and a fact per se cannot be misleading. It's as simple as that. Linguistic conventions, as you've illustrated, can be formed over time, but that again doesn't take away from the fact that such usage is grammatically incorrect to begin with.
...the reason "in some dialects of English native speakers really do say 'should of' etc" is phonetics. Kids hear "should've" and repeat it phonetically, before learning the actual words or their meaning. Combine that with the awful state of education and literacy in the USA (and other countries etc) and voila, you've got some armchair internet expert justifying it with some big words trying a weeeee bit too hard to make it work.
Then you've got teachers who still gaf and know their shit who will correct this before middle/high school, and no, last I checked it was never added to the dictionary or considered correct. Language of course is living and ever changing, but the line must be drawn somewhere lest we devolve into shouting and grunts like neanderthals
Kids hear “should’ve” and repeat it phonetically,
This is the failure of "no child left behind"; it seems that's all it did !
the reason “in some dialects of English native speakers really do say ‘should of’ etc” is phonetics.
What the author of the first link claims (and the second link explains in a more accessible way), is that it's not just that for everyone. Like some native speakers really do say "of" sometimes, even when it's stressed and doesn't sound like "'ve" at all. So for them it wouldn't just be a spelling mistake, but a different grammatical construction.
last I checked it was never added to the dictionary
Some dictionaries (e.g. Merriam-Webster) actually do list "of" as an alternate spelling of "have" (not in the sense of a genuinely different grammatical construction though).
Obviously it's not considered standard by anyone, which is also why teachers call it incorrect, who (should) teach the standard dialects.Language of course is living and ever changing, but the line must be drawn somewhere lest we devolve into shouting and grunts like neanderthals
Language changes whether you and I like it or not, and efforts to stop that from happening are generally unsuccessful. You can also rest assured that a simple change in what is considered correct grammar or spelling (which, as far as I know, nobody has been suggesting in this case so far, but it seems like that would be the "worst-case" scenario from your perspective) would not lead to us or language "devolving". Also, while we don't know anything precise about how Neanderthals spoke, most likely they sounded more or less like us and did not communicate by "shouting and grunts".
“Should of” is incorrect
itself is at least a bit misleading and prescriptivist in its generality.
I'm not sure what's misleading. 2+2 != 5 no matter how many "use a grammatical construction" otherwise. That's like a participation medal.
We call those people 'wrong' and we move on.
And, I understand a lot of people can be wrong. Entire belief systems are based on mass delusion, so it's not like it'd be anything new.
@ronaldtemp1 Reading through this thread has made me realize... Esperanto really is a fantastic language!
Lojban, too!
Or, also, English when we kick out the Beckies.
I should of known
You should halve your outrage at poor grammar usage.
I reflected on the the whole thing after hearing opinions from both sides of users. I now realise I don’t care as much anymore which may be a good thing.
Also I saw or I've seen. Never I seen.
Have all the things that I of lost, I miss my perspicuity the most.
I'm guilty of should of, but I usually use shoulda as I tend to type how I talk, and my pronunciation is somewhat lazy.
However I'm of the opinion that as long as the point is gotten across, there is no wrong way to communicate. Alot of people actually say "should of" while speaking, and it only makes sense that they'd type that way, usually without a second thought till someone interrupts a discussion with grammar correction, which let's face it, brings NOTHING to the table.
I should of known.
Not wanting to be purposefully controversial, but language is a tool for communication and as long as it's understood by the target audience, then I'd say it was used effectively.
The English language doesn't have a governing body (unlike say French and Spanish) and so whatever we agree on is correct usage. "Grammatically incorrect" has long been a dog-whistle signifier for elitism (you don't have the expensive education to know what's correct) and racism (the local dialect that you speak isn't our 'prestige' version, therefore you are inferior) and I don't really like to see it. Even when those aren't your intentions when correcting people, it still rankles with me.
Not that I'd write 'should of' on my CV or anything, but it doesn't offend me any on an internet forum.
and as long as it's understood by the target audience
Duy'ou-ndarstend Diz?
Understanding written text is more difficult when the existing established conventions that impart meaning are ignored.
Sure, those conventions evolve over time, some errors are worse than others, and no one's going to write perfectly all the time. But that doesn't mean anything goes and the writer has no responsibility to write clearly and correctly.
True. Just because "language is descriptive" (descriptivist will always let you know) doesn't mean everyone can go freestyle with language, carelessly introducing ambiguity and miscommunication. They always say "as long as it gets the point across" but as a non-native but still pretty fluent, most of the time they don't actually get the point across.
I use this same argument against people censoring swears. Not only is it pointless, but man is it annoying to read, too.
Wait, my 6th grade English teacher was a racist? That explains a lot.
Thanks for the info about French and Spanish governing bodies. TIL
Ha, "rankles". (✿☉｡☉)