I guess I’ll be dating myself here, but I can’t help it. I was educated in the 60′s, and one thing they kept drilling into our heads was English Grammar. You remember Grammar, don’t you? All about words and how they fit together to make sentences. Grammar was about syntax, function and style, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, yada yada. It was about spelling, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, contractions, and… hey, let’s look at contractions for a minute.
Something I have been noticing over the last few years is how English Grammar doesn’t seem to be as important anymore. There seems to be a lot more emphasis put on English Literature. How do I know this? I watched my two sons all the way through school and have seen them make these errors. Another reason I know is because I am constantly reading other people’s words and can tell that school curriculums either don’t include contractions any more, or maybe we should put the blame on the students who might have slept through the lessons.
For example, let’s look at the words could, should, and would. Further, let’s add the word have to the mix – could have, should have, and would have. These combinations have a shortcut, which has been deemed acceptable by those in charge of grammar (grammarians or grammatists?). The contractions are could’ve, should’ve, and would’ve. I don’t think this is too hard to comprehend – you drop a couple of letters and add an apostrophe. What could be simpler than that? In my mind, nothing.
So why is it that I keep reading sentences like the following – Well, if we would of been there, we could of done something about it. Do you think we should of? Does anyone else recognize the errors? And can you explain what could of actually means? If not, then it’s time you learned the truth. Just because we pronounce something a certain way, it doesn’t mean we have to write it like it sounds. That’s the beauty (or is that the horror) of the English Language. They say it’s the hardest language to learn, especially if it’s not your first language. Maybe so, but don’t you think that if English is our only language, shouldn’t we at least try to use it properly? What kind of example are we setting here?
Ignorance is no excuse. If you plan to make writing your bread and butter, don’t you owe it to yourself to make your writing as perfect as it can be? Do you think agents are going to drool over your stories if they keep coming across gross errors such as the above examples? If rejection letters are what you want, I guess you just keep writing the same way as always, and you’ll have plenty of rejection letters to read.
And don’t even get me started on acronyms. Yikes!
You are absolutely right. Everyone however should employ an editor as well as performing their own due diligence to their spelling and grammar to minimise or eliminate howlers that will just beat a path from the slushpile to the garbage-can. (or ‘bin’ as we say over here in Ireland). I fear however that text messaging will do no service to the language.
I agree, Patrick. Sometimes it’s hard to understand how things got to this point, but then again, we’re all subject to the laws of human nature. Thanks for visiting and leaving some thoughts. DWF
I am a non-native English speaker. I read and leave comments on YouTube videos quite often. One day, while I was reading a comment, I stumbled upon a sentence which contained one of those “could/should/would + of” gems… The first time I read the sentence I thought it was some new grammatical construction I wasn’t familiar with. I was thinking about what it could possibly mean for about two minutes… Literally. I wondered how I hadn’t heard the expression before because I had been an English speaker for more than ten years already. I found out that it’s a mistake even after I “googled” it.
I am writing this comment because I am genuinely concerned about the future of the English language. Although it’s not my mother-tongue, as I already said, I love it. More precisely I love the idea of a universal language – one language with the power to bring the world closer together. Born in 1991, I was lucky to experience its most recent, and I daresay most dramatic growth – triggered by the growth of the Internet. Unfortunately, it’s also the cause of the pollution of the language we witness every day. I wish it was only the “verb + of” mistake.. It turns out that there are more illiterate people than one could imagine, and which is most tragic – they are mainly native speakers. They use “your” instead of “you’re” and vice-versa, “their” instead of “they’re”, “try and” instead of “try to” (in situations where it doesn’t make sense) and many more… I feel like my head will explode when I read something like that.
Thanks for the great post, I enjoyed every word of it.