this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
692 points (93.5% liked)

You Should Know

32720 readers
8 users here now

YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.

All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.



Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason "Why" YSK:

**In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.



Partnered Communities:

You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.

Community Moderation

For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.

Credits

Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Ashralien 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

People writing of instead of 've is pretty well attested before Siri even existed so I doubt that has much to do with it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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).

[–] ronaldtemp1 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Isn't "have" either an auxiliary verb or verb and "of" a preposition?

Are these acceptable? If yes, why? If not, why not?

  • I of heard that story before.

  • Diane of already gone.

  • John ofn't phoned, of he?

  • I ofn't visited London before.

  • Of you seen Roz?

  • Of she been invited?

  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don’t know man, Oxford Dictionary ...

Tells us what's popular; sometimes also what happens to be correct.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] FreedomOfExpression 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"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.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@ronaldtemp1 Reading through this thread has made me realize... Esperanto really is a fantastic language!

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›