UKC

Could of/should of/would of; when did this nonsense become so widespread? It’s everywhere (especially on Facebook), with imbeciles everywhere & of all ages constantly using ‘of’ instead of ‘have’  

What makes it worse is that you’re called a ‘grammar nazi’ for correcting them, and made to feel as if being literate is somehow wrong. Humanity is doomed. 

A no. Your right its annoying. 

It's called 'evolution of language'

Have a ‘like’ as in a filler word.

Yes, I agree. It literally makes me mildly irritated.

Can I add, "off of", as really irritating?

For anyone who uses this phrase, please listen.

You took something off the shelf or you took something from the shelf, but you did not take something, off of the shelf.

Dave

You're...as an aforementioned grammar nazi. I couldnt resist (see what I did there?).

It's a loose loose situation alright.

No. It's called ignorance, a failure to understand the construction being used and is probably caused by people not reading and repeating what they think they have heard.

"Triggered". You need a safe space.

No. It's called completely missing the point, which I did try and emphasise with three green faces.
There was a recent thread on here about words changing, whatever, and it was put down to language evolving. Doth thou now graspeth mine meaning, sire?

Nay, knave

No it isn’t, it’s laziness at best & is wholly moronic. ‘Of’ is defined as ‘expressing the relationship between a part and a whole’, which has nothing at all to do with possessing or having done something, as per ‘have’. They are not interchangeable.

If anything, the dumbing down of language like this demonstrates a reversal of evolution (both in language & the knuckle-dragging imbeciles who write ‘should of’). 

Some people feel really proud of their mastery of the complex but largely illogical and highly artificial rules on grammar and spelling.  

That’s great. Mastery of anything is a cause for celebration.

A subset of those people use their mastery to laud it over people who have used their brain capacity to learn other stuff that’s more relevant to their lives. 

That subset of people are a bit sad.

Often those sad people will trample all over another subset of people whose brains just aren’t built to cope with the rediculous place human language is currently passing through.  

There’s nothing quite like mocking people about a consequence of their disability to make these sad people feel better.

Signed,

A bitter and grumpy dyslexic.

You mean "lord" not "laud" in that context.  "Laud" means praise, which, I think, is the opposite of what you want to convey.

Um, no.  I've learned lots of other stuff *as well* as how to use my mother tongue ok.

Um, bollocks.  Just sayin' - human language is a written and verbal set of social norms.  It isn't "a place" that anything is "passing through".

I don't see much mocking. Nor any disablility.

“Literate: Able to read and write”.  Given your own admission that you are seeing (and therefore presumably reading) this on Facebook I believe these people are literate.

I believe you mean “grammatically correct” not “literate”.  It’s perfectly possibly to be literate but to have bad grammar and/or spelling.

Our language has evolved to be highly redundant - more letters and words are used than are needed for good understanding.  Why do you think it has evolved thusly?  I suggest because the high level of redundancy provides forwards error correction against noise introduced by different people having different spelling,  grammer and pronunciation - all of which have been highly fluid over time and geography) allowing people to comprehend well despite linguistic differences.

So the very concept of a single standard grammar, pronounciation or spelling is betrayed by the complex story told by the makeup of our language. 

Perhaps I should start a thread about people who think they’re clever with something when they only have a surface level understanding of what they’re talking about.

Or perhaps I should skulk off to a righteous grump before I accumulate all the dislikes...

Blaming it on dyslexia doesn’t really cut it, and is rather insulting to those who are actually dyslexic and not just thick. 

Indeed I do - I know these things but I am almost incapable of spotting when I’ve used the wrong spelling of a word.  I do if I put something down and come back to it with fresh eyes which is why my posts are often edited.

What I mean is that the rules of grammer and spelling are fluid with time and place, and that English at the moment is in a complicated and ugly place (in terms of design for humans) that reflects the incredibly tortuous and numerous routes taken to form its current state.  It’s highly unlikely the language will stay as it is now.  It’s also nothing like a language that would be designed from scratch with all we now know.

Languages are either passing from the past through the present to the future or they’re dead. There’s a lot to be said for learning a dead language - my spanish is behind the times and has an uncommon regional “th” accent but my Latin isn’t going off.

I like your “social norms” view because most social norms are quite wide.

I was ranting much more generally than this thread.  There’s a reasoanble anmount of criticism of spelling and grammer from posters on UKC and the people doing it never do see the underlying disability.  I want a ‘D’ for dyslexia badge on here,

You’re talking to someone with severe dyslexia who also never went to the kind of school where someone explained all off this stuff and who despite being more functionally numerate than 90% of the people they meet, doesn’t call them “thick”.  Edit: Because they’re not thick.  Just like I don’t assume someone is thick because they write in a way commonly considered less correct than me.  

Is the mis-substitution you made really caused by Dyslexia?  "Laud" is a relatively unusual word (compared with "lord").  So it appears more as though you had spelled a word correctly, but used it incorrectly?

Since we’re already deep into pedant territory... off of is actually a very old idiom. First seen in the 16th century and used at least once by Shakespeare (Henry IV).

language evolution does not mean substituting a totally meaningless word(in a particular context) for the correct word.

I expect it's come from 'could've', the contracted form of 'could have'. The f of 'of' is pronounced /v/, so it's pretty easy to understand how one led to the other. 

My personal bugbear is 'in the future' being steadily replaced by 'moving forward'. Sloppy contractions I can deal with; corporate BS makes me f*cking seethe!!

Homophones absolutely floor me.  It doesn’t help that I don’t know how “laud” is pronounced but in my head “laudable” is “lord-able” so in my head “laud” is pronounced “lord”.  So one of several mistakes could be to blame.  I’m not sure that’s dyslexia so much as a poor ability to predict pronounciation. 

What is I think my dyslexia is doing is an inability to read what I wrote - I see what I think I wrote.  Unless I come at something with fresh eyes mistakes I’m perfectly capable of spotting in someone else’s text just aren’t there to me.  So a mistake like the one above is really difficult for me to spot.

The atrocious state of my spelling isn’t so obvious with modern spellcheckers by homophones persist to be a problem.

 I could devote more time to improving my language skills so that some people don’t judge me as “thick” but it’s more useful to me to study to overcome limitations actually affecting my work (currently efficient calculation of the null space of a very large and very sparse matrix) and my hobbies (currently understanding how a Finnish Hay Barn fits together so I can figure out which trees to cut down).  

We only have so much time on the planet and if someone’s language skills are sufficient for their life, who am I to judge?  Language is a tool.  Tools are created, adopted and adapted by people for a purpose.  The purpose is more important than the tool.  

Fair.

A lot of genetic evolution is driven by random substitutions.  Try new things, and if they work better they propogate.  If they don’t, they fade away.

The god awful rise of “like” as a reflexive mannerism sprinkled all over sentences is a counter point to my argument like.

The first time I came across it was in Steinbeck. But it was inside inverted commas, attempting to replicate a phonetic expression.

Later on, people like McCarthy did the same thing but didn't use the punctuation marks to delineate speech. So it has gained currency in general language use.

Unlike "we was" for "we were" which is wrong because it simply uses the wrong form of the verb to fit the pronoun, "could of" actually employs a preposition to take the place of a verb.

People who think that's an acceptable part of language evolution should be equally happy with "I at a bit of trouble with the start of that route"

It annoys me when people associate language mistakes or errors with being moronic / thick / unintelligent. That is wrong and a misunderstanding of both first- and second-language acquisition. Please stop it. Thank you for listening

I don’t know if you like science fiction, but if so do read “Feersum Endjinn” by Iain M Banks.

One of the characters writes phonetically and rather ungrammatically.  After about half a page I was reading it at least as fluidly as normal text.  

It depends how your brain works - and I can imagine it’s very different for the profoundly deaf for example - but when I read, the words recreate speech in my head and I listen to it.  Written language is normally used to store spoken language.

I’m all for rules of grammer and spelling because of the obvious benefits but it’s interesting to me to think about what they’re really about.

Watching toddlers use voice control and tablets, and even adopting computer dictation myself at times, I do wonder what future the written language has with the average person in 20 years.

That's interesting. I found Feersum Endjinn really hard work because of this, I'm? obviously wired to be a grammar Nazi. I don't get upset about dyslexic spelling, but I do find it hard work to read.

What I object to is the misuse of clearly defined words: the 'of' of the OP, the demise of 'literally' as a meaningful word, with 'random' going the same way. What are we supposed to use now that 'literally' no longer means literally?

??

Is it just me, or does Android autocorrect not work on this forum?

It regularly replaces properly spelled words with gibberish, and inserts question marks all over my post when I submit it.

I guess you probably read by recognizing the word rather than picking up each letter in the order presented.

I would argue that this comes from the analytic phonics way of teaching when you're a kid and it sticks with you. (synthetic phonics being the way forward).

either way, the English language is a bastarded shitpile of words that are pronounced nothing like how they are written.

I think you've got the wrong perspective on English grammar. The language didn't start with a set of rules that clearly an unambiguously defined the language, it's the other way around, the language existed and a set of rules was created that tried to match it best as it could. Hence the huge number of exceptions and contradictions in the rules of grammar.

When the language changes (and thank God it does, who wants a dead language?) you should change the rules to accommodate the changed language. No matter how wrong it feels you can't hold back the tide of change.

This is an interesting article I thought - https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/changing-grammar-and-new-words-in...

I think I'm somewhere between the two of you, I found Feesum Endjinn a right pain for a few pages, then suddenly I could just read it but 'incorrect' grammar also bugs me.

I used to be none the wiser (never really thought about it) about the difference between 'fewer' and 'less', but once I realised the difference the use of 'less' when it should be 'fewer' started to annoy me. Frankly I wish I'd never bothered learning the difference, I can't see that it's a particularly useful distinction and  I think 'fewer' is dying out so I'll just continue to be annoyed at the 'incorrect' use when actually the language has changed and I'm the one who's stuck with an outdated version in my head.

It’s interesting isn’t it; deWalt gave a better explanation than I could.  There are very different approaches to reading going on in different people’s heads.

I totally agree on literally and like.  The OPs case however is I find different as explained in “the uncomfortable truth”’s 19:34 post.  It’s a phonetic spelling of a contraction that probably many people don’t realise was a contraction.  It’s not robbing “of” of other meanings in the way a abuse of “literally” does.  I see it as a window in to one of the processes by which a language changes.  Presumably a lot of the other erratic, illogical and un-necessary gumf in English was born in a similar way.  Given my feelings on the English language I should be against it, but the patient is to far gone.

It's the inevitable consequence of giving a platform to people who were educated in the eighties and nineties when grammar was considered less important than freedom of expression. Imagine allowing millions of illiterate Victorian mill workers to stick billions of notes all over the city expressing all kinds of thoughts and opinions. That's social media. 

Out of interest, do you read poetry? I am completely unable to get anything out of it when reading, but when I hear someone else reading poetry well it all makes sense. It's like reading music and hearing someone play it. It appears that when I read text it doesn't use the audio part of my brain, the text is interpreted directly into concepts. For other people it seems that the text is first interpreted as speech sounds, which are then interpreted into the concepts they represent.

I simply cannot understand why or how anyone who has been well taught in English language can misinterpret the 've contraction as "of". It looks wrong, it sounds wrong and it IS wrong. Maybe it ultimately reflects upon declining education standards.

I do not recall ever having been aware of it except within about the last ten years. Perhaps it's one of the (many) negative aspects of "text speech" which has brought about an attitude of sloppiness and laziness in the way we use our language.

I sometimes read poetry - a bit partial to Walt Whitman.  I don’t experience it much differently reading or listening, except that I am generally frustrated by listening to the spoken word as I find it very slow.

Sonewhat related - I cant identify musical tones, and if I hear one I can’t reproduce it myself or with an instrument.  I am also utterly incapable of changing my accent in a convincing way and I sometimes wonder if these are related.

I shall try and explain why I think this is

Looks/sounds.  It is a mistake to assume spoken and written English are the same language.  They are not.  They are closely related and somewhat bound together but they are not taught at the same age or with the same (in)formality.

How it sounds is a strong reflection on ones regional accent and dialect and is in no way a reflection on education standards.

Social media means that laterly I see a lot more text from a lot of different places than the geographically and socially closed world I grew up in.

The patient was too far gone in 1922 when Noist Trinité published The Chaos... 

http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

If you don't experience poetry differently whether reading or listening, then that would suggest to me that you read in a very linear fashion, one word after the other in their written order. So reading phonetic text is no different from normal writing. I'm aware that I read in a spatial fashion. I get an overview of the whole page, then skim sentences and pause or go back if something needs more attention. So if I'm forced to read text in order I find it very frustrating. I wonder if these very different reading styles explain why some of us are so keen on grammar and some don't care?

I can understand the problems of people who can't tell 've from of. S'all the same. I do it with maths.

I sometimes use + when I ought to use x but s'all the same, inntit?  I mean they look almost the same, don't they? Just two crossed lines so people will know what I mean, won't they? I don't know why people make such a fuss anyway. I mean 2+2=4 doesn't it and 2x2=4 as well so they must be the same. Sobvious

The correct phrasing is actually:

"Coulda Woulda Shoulda "

Celine Dion demonstrates it perfectly  youtube.com/watch?v=iAQC8X1JJvM&

If I’m enjoying something for leisure - or have to read it properly for work - then I do.  If I’m loosing interest in a book or are quickly digesting something technical I jump around skipping a lot looking for visual cues for interest.

I’m sure there’s a lot of overlap between the sort of things you describe and keenness on adherence to grammer.  Even the concept of reading in a defined sequence is a very basic form of grammer rule and one defined in a relatively concrete way (for grammer) by the linear nature of time [1] and human speech and hearing.  Human visual processing however is highly non-parallel not purely linear in time, especially the segmentation of a visual field in to “interesting” bits worthy of more attention then given time sequentially.

Related - some people born without the main links between the two halves of their brain can speed ready by having each eye and opposing brain half read a separate page.

[1] is it linear time or is it a perception of linear time?

That's a good point.

Mathematical language is precise, there is no room for flexibility and interpretation. I wonder if there's a correlation between people who misuse words and those who struggle with maths?

You’ll find a lot of anti-correlated people. Although not explicitly taught so at school, the language we use for maths has strictly formal rules and “grammer”.  This seems to suit a different mindset to the basically insane, inconsistent, illogical and borderline demented rules and exceptions of English grammer. 

WC2’s point is interesting because the operator (+ or x) is central to his maths example but the “have” or “of” from the OP is often redundant (“I should done it”, for example, still makes sense because the past tense is encoded in the form of do/done)

I don't know if you're being facetious but it's pretty obvious the rules of natural languages and the rules of maths are completely different beasts because they they're used for different purposes.

Conversations might be a little bit stilted if English was as concise and exact as maths and maths might be a bit tricky if it was as vague as English.

Are you sure you shoulda started this thread? You coulda done something less provocative

As a left hander, while tired I put my train ticket through the ticket activated gate thing with my left hand and (logically for me) tried to walk through the gates right in front of me, and I was looked at as if I was daft when the gates to my left opened to my surprise - because they're designed for right handers to use. It's often tricky to zig when the rest of society zags, being dyslexic must be an order of magnitude trickier than that.

Try being a left handed dyslexic!

I put a lot of effort in to coping strategies for my dyslexia but now it’s not consuming much effort.  I am lucky that I can always have a colleague proof read professional output for me.  I know other people who have far worse problems than me caused by their forms of dyslexia.  Whilst it’s by no means the main factor behind the OP’s rant, I do wish posters on UKC would give consideration to what lies behind the different grammer and spelling of some posters.

Facetious? Moi?

My point is that language works  through a set of accepted rules (grammar) and definitions (vocabulary). Once you enter the Humpty Dumpty world of 'Words mean whatever I want them to mean' the wheels start to come off.

I was contrasting the way nobody would dispute the need for precision when using maths 'language' with  the idea that expecting people to use words correctly  is dismissed as some kind of snobbish Dickensian foible or, worse still makes you a 'grammar Nazi'. Has anyone ever heard  someone being called a 'Maths Nazi' for pointing out that a calculation is wrong? Words like 'have' and 'of' have completely different meanings and serve entirely different purposes in the language, To suggest they are interchangeable because they may sound similar is as daft and saying  x and + are mathematically interchangeable because they bear a passing resemblance to each other.

In reply to someone else's comment  further up the thread that spoken and written language  are used differently, this is undoubtedly true. Spoken language is often a muddled mess. If you see a transcript of what you might consider a quite articulate conversation you quickly see that in written form it is a dog's breakfast with people losing their thread, switching ideas, bringing in fresh thoughts mid sentence or even throwing in a joke half way through  with the result that we often start one sentence and finish a completely different one. We all do that. However that is not the same as simply getting words wrong as in the use of could of, would of and should of.

I remember failing to read brer rabbit in the original deep south phonetic text as a boy. It makes a bit more sense now, looking at it:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22282/22282-h/22282-h.htm

It literally does (see the OED).

It's interesting to read your explanation of  how 'laud' and 'lord' behaves for you. It's also interesting to see that you always spell 'grammar' as 'grammer', even though grammer simply doesn't exist as a word. So grammar and grammer are homophones, yet grammer should not exist. To me this seems like you were simply never taught the correct spelling of grammar because you can obviously spell.

I can spell and have always struggled to understand how dyslexia 'works' - often people spell things wrong and blame dyslexia, when it simply cannot be that.

You should move to Barcelona. I put my ticket in right-handed like I would anywhere else, and stood there like an idiot until someone pointed out that the gate to the right of the ticket hole had opened.

I was taught spelling.  I had extra lessons and all.  I paid attention and worked at it.  It didn’t work very well!

Everything your read is through the lens of a spellchecker.  My phone autocorrects many of my mistakes but doesn’t “red wiggle” the others.  Now I type in grammer, I see that if I tap on it it suggests “grammar”.   (And “gamer”).  I should really try and turn red wiggles on (Safari on iOS 12 if anyone knows...).  Like I said earlier I think this is more related to my poor ability to link written spellings to pronunciation.  For what it’s worth I have now burnt another bit of mental capacity learning to read that words as “gram-ahhh” in my head so I can spell it.  I assume most adults don’t have to do this....  If I don’t use over the top phonetic sounding in my inner voice then the spelling won’t stick.

It’s a raft of effects that are different for different people.  It hit my writing badly at the young age where we were taught spelling by reading and writing, and I really struggle to see mistakes when I “know” what I’ve written.  

There’s recent mounting evidence that some dyslexia is down to a biological glitch preventing the development of a dominant eye, presumably interfering with the partitioning or reading within to one hemisphere of the brain, leading to dischord and confusion.  This then goes on with a young child to undermine a lot of tasks that reading is critical to.  I think there’s still a lot of unknowns but I am not an expert in the area.

I can do a lot of maths in my head quickly, and have an intuitive understanding of a lot of numerical stuff.  I struggle to understand how other people can’t do this so well - but I know it’s because we are all very different in brain makeup and developmental background.  The difference is that most people’s maths ability isn’t on show most of the time.  

I've never struggled to understand your posts.

This is a forum and people often answer quickly and untidily (quite a few working on tiny mobile screens) and mistakes on posts are completely forgivable, and easily clarified if important to the intended  meaning. If a post contents were a CV or a book, better editing might be very important.

This site is also where I discovered Muphry's law and is the scene of some of the most regular occurances of that law that I've seen anywhere (including some above).

So stuff the 'grammar nazis' and their sad obsessions. Love the evolving and beautiful  thing that is English and celebrate with fellow travellers that get it:

youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY&

http://www.stephenfry.com/2008/11/dont-mind-your-language…/

I was going to link to that but you beat me to it!

I'm firmly of the belief that if you can understand it then it's fine. I would particularly pick out: 

"Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind."

I just think you are comparing apples and oranges in this instance, demonstrated by your example that 'grammar Nazi' is a commonly used phrase yet 'Maths Nazi' isn't.

You can't use the fact that maths is a exact and precise language to argue that English is a precise and exact language!

Obviously if everyone was like Dumpty Dumpty then we'd have difficultly communicating but you don't need hard and fast rules to enforce this because it's works as a consequence of what it is, the forms of language that make communication easier are the ones that naturally survive and spread, the forms of language that make communication harder naturally die out.

I’ve used public transport in Barcelona quite a lot and never noticed. I’m a lefty though, so I’be 40+ years to adapt to the world around me being quite wrong. I still sometime expect things to open to the right though, as they will when I rule the world!

Don't mind "off of" being used in a song so that the lyrics balance the tune. Only example I can think of is a Waylon Jennings song "I just can't keep my hands off of you." Townes Van Zandt used "off of" in a song but I can't remember which one.

Humanities glass is half empty - 'of' being that something was out of reach in life where as 'have' was that it was in reach but didn't go for it perhaps ?

L

In a similar vein, something that really annoys me unreasonably is when people, to mark the excellence of something, refer to it as being 'top draw'.

These people are obviously from a drawer somewhat lower down in the cabinet of excellence.

T.

'Of' in 'could of' actually takes the place of the auxiliary, not the verb.

eg. I could have climbed that route 20 years ago. Aux = have. Verb = climb.

And while, like you say, 'we was' is always wrong, 'I were' can be correct if it's being used as the subjunctive. Even foreigners know that! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_XeHLrkwTY&t=0m30s

Ps. I'm only pointing this out coz this thread is dedicated to language pedantry! 

Absolutely. It's only bullies and villains who seek to keep words frozen in the "true" meanings they like to believe they have mastered.

Defo! Wonderful use of language

Oh come on! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFToiLtXro&t=0m19s  

There are benefits from the standardisation of English, but the point about bullies is telling - language is frequently about power, and standardisation is implicitly bound up with the exercise of power. 

When you think about it “out of” is perfectly normal, with “of” standing for “from within” or some similar.  “The magma came out of the volcano”.  Given the similarities between a surface and a volume, “off of” seems defensible.

Thanks for that, and in terms of your 'gram-ahh' technique you're not alone - I do the same thing with certain words. Perhaps everyone does it, yet you didn't realise that's what you had to do?

Certainly agree about language and power - but must also confess I was indulging in a bit of harmless etymological fun. Amuses me now I'm retired from English (and sometimes Linguistics) teaching. The alternative - when I see people with less than perfect literacy dismissed as "thick" - would be to sob quietly. I fear this would discomfit those around me. 

I suppose, if we're going to allow 'of' to substitute for a truncated version of 'have', then 'I of', 'we of' and 'you of' are just around the corner. I think they do already do this in western rural parts. As an example, 'We of just had eight pints of scrumpy and I of just shit my breeches'.

Bullies and villains? Seriously?  Seriously?  I'm saving that one for the next bullying villain who tries to tell me that  2+2 is not 22 because I can see that's right with my own eyes. That'll learn 'em, eh?

There's a difference between evolving language and incorrect grammar. Personally I detest the growing use of 'super' to mean 'very' as in super psyched, super hard etc but I accept that it is an evolution of language and a new use of the word so I had just better get used to it. 'Could of' on the other hand is the fruit of ignorance and mishearing, plain and simple.

Thank you.

I was using "verb" as shorthand for "auxiliary verb" because I thought a five syllable word might cause problems for people who can't differentiate between "have" and "of".

And in your example, isn't "could " also part of the auxiliary?

I refer you to my above confession that I was indulging in a little etymological fun. 

As others have pointed out, your comparison is a category mistake. Language is arbitrary, mathematics is tautology. 2 x 2 = 22 is logically incoherent and we can derive mathematical proofs that explicitly preclude it. Metaphors are probably the closest linguistic equivalent but we don't mind them because the purpose of language is to communicate rather than to uncover logical truths. 

That's true. That's why I wrote 2+2=22, which is lateral thinking (after a fashion)

Using "off" instead of "from" is just as bad - eg "he got it off a friend".

wouldn't it be Disphonia or Disaudia in the case of spoken language abuse?

cos the shit needed out

My original rant was a general gripe about the grammatically superior rather than a suggestion that the specific issue in the OP was down to dyslexia.  

Most “abuse” of spoken language I think comes down to regional and social factors - that is who one talks with and what one listens to - rather than things such as those you list.  

My point with dyslexia is not that it’s behind my grammatical abuses in written English but that it hampers my ability to spot them.  It’s different for different people though.

I’ve struggled on forums here with Dyslexia especially when a theme is fast paced.

I have the opposite problem - people call me fussy because incorrectly spelt words seem to jump out of the page at me sometimes before I've even read through properly - might be something to so with not having fantastic eyesight I think so I don't focus carefully enough.

2x2 can be 11 though!

My 'two cultures' concern is more with an 'elite' disdain for mathematics, rather than anything about simple arithmetic; in particular those tory editors and ministers seem obsessed with the memorising of times tables. Maths was always a world of wonder to me , whereas arithmetic was boring donkey work . No wonder so many kids hate maths when their entry to this world, is barred by such tiresome nonsense,  forced on them by ideological obsessives. These days we have tools like  MATLAB to play with once people get the process. See the connection with grammar obsession and Fry's essays?

Irrespective of arguments about dyslexia, language evolution etc., to say or write "would/should/could of..." instead of "would/should/could have..." is downright wrong. It makes no sense whatsoever and is due, more than anything I believe, to ignorance.

Transgressors should be shot at dawn

1. Grice's Razor.

2. This exchange illustrates the crux of the matter; you can parse my message despite the mistake. Sometimes effective communication requires precision and clarity, but often it doesn't - so economy of effort takes precedence (if you're lazy like me).

Is that a matrix joke?

The Stephen Fry video is delightful, and a comprehensive rebuttal to pedantry. Thanks for posting that. 

???I quite agree, arithmetic and spelling are necessary evils on the road to more interesting things, rather than ends of merit in themselves.  

I must confess though; I've never been great at maths (it punishes my fecklessness) and I'm currently making heavy weather of learning Matlab for the same reason!

I've given you a like because in principle it is wrong and will always be wrong, but I'm less happy about blaming people's ignorance when world class novelists are using it in their work and expecting people to make the distinction between phonetic rendering of language and correct grammatical usage.

And I wouldn't shoot them for it.

Unlike people misusing "random".

Curiously, the same is sometimes seen in reverse, when climbers refer to clipping 'quick-drawers'.

I used to know a girl who was known as 'quick drawers'...

Who would they be? They need to be reminded how wrong they are and I'm being serious.

I live in Germany and habe a Herman Smartphone oft a rather obscure make. The autocorrect changes Evers englisch word toe the nearest Herman one, so Evers post takes twice AS long AS it should. I tried toe alter this, but the only alternative it gäbe me was Aserbaidschan. 

I have to disagree with you about the importance of times tables. Yes, they are boring, but they are extremely useful for the basic everyday arithmetic that everyone needs to know. My daughter really struggles with basic maths, and I can see all the time how much easier it would be if she had times tables memorised.

If it's Android you should be able to change the autocorrect language from the keyboard. I've used this before.

You could kick off with Cormac McCarthy. You might want to have a word with him about his apostrophes while you're at it. Who knows, if you help him sort out his SPAG he might get a Nobel to go with his Pulitzer. 

Tables should not be seen as maths, they are pretty essential however to life. A bit like capitals aren’t geography, and dates aren’t history, but still knowledge that is very useful to have without looking up.

Perhaps he should get a new proof reader

If so, let's hope he (or she) is good with full stops. 

where do you drawer the lien with tabels though?  It would probably be quite useful to have memorised a compleat set of 5 figure tabels when I was struggelling with maths back in the days b4 electronik calculaters

The only tabel I remembered in in that vast central part was 6 x 7 = 42 - all things could be stepped backward and forwards from that

If you’re going to go to the effort of learning times tables, you might as well learn some log tables instead.  Far more useful...

Wood that I had the ability!

That all really depends how good your memory is and the level of inspiration to remember stuff. These days anyone can look stuff up  on a phone and yet school is still way too dominated by remembering loads of guff up front in an uninspiring context.

When I was at school I was very bright kid with an average memory and some word blindness. I knew before school how to cheat on times tables, using patterns,  to avoid rote memory.  Later on, to stop classes driving me mad/boring me senseless I would try and work out why we were being tortured with any particular memory stuff, often before we did it. I also very early on started a lifelong habit of  reading widely in literature, biography and factual texts (I still adore some of the more inspirational books in this area like: The Science of Strong Materials) . I also learned tricks to remember things and to avoid needing to remember at all (a good maths party trick is to multiply two numbers together in the nineties by using a '100-n' trick ). The reasons why the teacher wanted us to learn (often never stated) helped motivate me, even when I could see flaws.  In the end this motivation along with tricks helped me do better in humanities O level subjects than peers with much better memories. My real problem at the time was French, where my context tricks were much harder to use... the O level class was a bit chaotic and the teacher very grammar focussed and I failed the oral and got a D.. a friend of the family helped out and on the back of a few sessions of fun and inspirational teaching  I got my grade B French in the sixth form .. vital for my Uni of choice.

Unsurprisingly I became very sympathetic to those who struggle with words or memory (or any other problem area for that matter) and encouraged dyslexic students, who too often saw themselves as thick (when the fact they got to University meant they were very bright) , to go on to do fantasticly well, with proper support.  I also realise that good teachers matter (even for bright kids) and the best learning often needs inspiration. To this day I regard it as pure nonsense for the average student to obsess much about grammer (and ditto,  kids with times tables) and the need for such has never been lower with modern IT tools. The complexities of grammar are easy to pick up later if you are in a very small minority of those who really need it (like editing) and away from formal writing I think it too often dulls the brain. It's scary when you realise what some say (loudly) is good  English grammar is nothing more than a disputed protocol. Think on how many rules Shakespeare broke.

Back on math...  25 years ago my office mate and I  took over the teaching  of BEng year 2 EEE Control and Communications,  (respectively) from some pretty conservative academics and we experimented with enthusiastically demonstrating the reasoning behind the subject areas and the power of the maths tools much more up front.  Lo and behold students seemed much better at learning the associated background mathematics than previous groups and progressed further as a result. We even tried to take over second year maths (the content was only really the Laplace and Fourier theory behind our subjects) but the IEE insisted it had to be taught by specialist maths staff (who sometimes didn't give a shit and could easily fail able students). I always taught the 'why' much more up front thereafter. In my current introductory Digital Control teaching it goes down really well (getting into the maths afterwards and using MATLAB GUI tools as soon as possible). The weaker students, some of whom had never studied control before leave smiling and know their limits and the better students sometimes get so carried away they produce a second assignment (a simulated industrial bearing testing control panel GUI and associated back end) that would comfortably pass as a major project.

Often all it takes is a useful context to get what is going on. When you add logarithms of two numbers the result is the logarithm of their multiplication.

Engineers have a form of them used to calculate power levels in systems, called decibels,  symbol dB. They use them in any system: from electical circuits, through fibre optics, to sound systems... the later being the most common example the public see . As examples: 3dB is ~ twice power;  -3dB is ~ half power;  -10dB is tenth power;  -20dB is hundreth power. For power changes in dB this is ten times the base ten logarithm of the number representing the change

Some examples in shorthand math terms: 10.Log(base 10) 2 being 3.32193 (to 5dp);

10.Log(base10) 0.5 being -3.32193;  10.Log(base 10) 0.1 = -10;   10.Log (base 10) 0.01 = -20    ...... etc

Decibels being in logarithmic form add/subtract to give power outputs of stages that multiply the effect of previous stages making it really easy to carry out system power budgets. As a two stage example (-3dB) + (-20dB) =-23db ~ 0.5% power droped across a stage that halves power followed by a stage that reduces power by a hundredth.

it's only relatively recently that I understood that slide rules were based on logarithms!   I suppose the use of slide rules influenced the development of standard form and floating point in calculations and eventually electronic digital computing.

Might be of interest...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logarithms

The preamble states that logarithms were in used in this way until the 1970s but they remained in quite common - if not well known - use for implementing some maths until much later in the “fast inverse square root” method - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

this is  beginning to remind me of the time I had need of trig functions in a 4GL language (ARTEMIS) that was originated as a critical path analysis and project management tool, so it had no use for such fripperies as trig and log but it did have a very good relational database (for that time ...) so I wrote a program to export trig functions from a normal language to be reimported as tables in a database, looked up by key value (the angle).  It worked rather well for what was needed even if it was brute force.

I understand that some computer scientist hobbyists have built CPUs based on enormous ROM chips where the numbers to be input to a mathematical function are input as address values to look up a unique address from which the value for the output of the function based on the two input values is obtained, thereby bypassing the need for for a conventional arithmetic unit.  

The miserable b*stards shouldn't have started the moaning in this thread but I'm glad they did now. Good stuff.

If you take the belief - popular in these parts - that the experience of consciousness arises from a purely classic brain that does nothing more than lots of calculations, then consciousness is - when reduced to absurdity - nothing more complicated than the system you describe.

You're welcome. I love this language shit! And I'm also fine with shit language. On that subject:   youtube.com/watch?v=igh9iO5BxBo&

Yep, although in this case it's a modal auxiliary rather than an auxiliary verb. But tbh I'm not sure if the 'have' of 'could have climbed' is part of the modal auxiliary or is considered an auxiliary verb. Anyone?

Out of my depth now

What is a purely classic brain? 

I am surprised you haven't gone postal already. Hats off for still making progress etc. 

So like have like a like like.

As long as he doesn't try to write a technical manual or anything comprehensible he can do what he wants.

I'm not sure about calculations - discussing this with an AI expert (over 20 years ago!) on the Mer de Glace we thought that something like throwing a stone of a certain size a certain distance to land in one of the little ponds on the glacier was probably more of a case retrieval and interpolation exercise than calculation and the same is probably true of many things we say we calculate, eg whether it is safe and how to overtake without being killed.  Working by informed "guess".

The important thing about our memory is I think is that anything or pattern "stored" has a way of itself knowing whether it is wanted, rather than being searched for like a calculator, as if there was an almost infinitely wide databus capable of presenting reality to everything stored so that those patterns can bid for attention at higher levels.  Coupled with "feeling" emotion to provide a "you are here" cursor on how the current reality and its interaction with what you know from the past affects the tiny "you"

Sure - but the in-vogue view is that the decisions on what to retrieve, and the interpolation and every other thought exists on top of computations being performed by neurones.

The way you describe memory almost sounds “holographic”.  There’s a crazy theory in that...

But suppose it was the answer to a question about whether or not you had climbed the route. The opening question would have been "Have you climbed that route?", not "Of your climbed that route?", and the reply would be constructed simply by changing the word-sequence and switching from 2nd to 1st person. English would be much more complicated than it really is if we had to use one auxiliary in an interrogative and a different auxiliary in a conditional declarative. It's like the weird affectation of gratuitously inflecting some (but not all!) pronouns when they're joined via "and" to other [pro]nouns (as in "you met me" becoming "You met him and I") - adding complexity that standard English doesn't have.

No stickler for good English would ever say "You met him and I". It's grammatically incorrect.

Yes, it's grammatically incorrect. The point is though, that the people who talk like this are applying some fantastically complicated rules to achieve their incorrectness, as are the people who selectively use "of" as an auxiliary. I doubt if any language inflects its pronouns according be whether or not they're used as components of compound nouns. Since English is much less inflected that, say, Russian, it's all the more baffling that some native speakers make this assumption.

People will go to great lengths to avoid using "me", as if it's in some way contaminated. The guard on the train will say, "If you need any assistance, please see myself or another member of staff."

yes, I was  brought up to think that "self" was an abstract concept, intangible, as opposed to body

Perhaps might start a trend of saying "If you have any queries just contact my consciousness ..."

I don't think you have to be anywhere approaching the level of a stickler to have a stomach-upset hearing English abusage like that.

I was taught quite a simple rule - write the sentence using the pronoun form that would be used if the other person was not included.  If that makes sense then it will usually be right.

To live is to fly
Low and high,
So shake the dust off of your wings
And the sleep out of your eyes.

Remind that Jack Kerouac to get On The Road to grammatical perfection. Reading the scroll version at this moment.

You don't need to raise the drug induced freedom of Kerouac when we have the editorial strictness in the experimentation of Joyce. These grammar obsessives really don't understand the power and joy of their own language.

Hats off to you and all that. I'd have possibly gone postal with that combination by now. 

I think it's quite the opposite: people who don't know what the rules are can't fully appreciate the impact of a deliberate breaking of rules for effect. The people I know who most joyously bend and play with language are poets who have a very strong sense of what the usual rules are.

It's very fashionable to sneer at grammatical "rules", but a lot of that seems to be push-back against improper applications, rather like complaining about "health and safety" banning conkers (or not). Most of the "rules" are actually quite helpful to consider when you're trying to make your writing clearer.

Take, for example, the rule about not splitting infinitives. It may well seem petty when you just want to boldly go somewhere. But when you want to boldly, but with some common sense precautions such as filling up your fuel tank, laying in a supply of maps and probably even packing a picnic basket, go somewhere, then it takes some mental effort to keep track of what's going on while you wait for the main verb. It's much easier on your reader to keep "to go" together and then tack on the rest.

Knowing how a language's structure works can really help in getting some sense out of sentences with unfamiliar vocabulary. Similarly, although it has also been fashionable to complain about the irregular spelling of English (for at least the last few centuries!), those irregularities can give us clues about the meanings of words, even unfamiliar ones, because they show how the word has developed in the language. That's especially valuable in a language such as English, which has been particularly good at absorbing influences from other languages.

I'll stop now before the essay gets too long. But I'll just add that it's much easier to get this sense of how language works by learning it early - it doesn't even have to be through formal learning but I do think that children should be exposed to as much clear and well-expressed (this is key!) material as possible, whether as spoken word or printed books or even internet posts.

(No doubt Muphry's Law will strike and this won't make any sense at all to anyone reading it...)

good point, and this thread is very interesting.

But I'm still none the wiser as to the national socialist's policy on language structure.

Glad I set you off again... a fair post. I also support good grammar teaching and in the UK this is too often only done well in foreign language classes, a teaching area that is sadly declining fast (sic). My concens are with people taking pot shots on quickly written forum posts and in the wider sense critiquing those who experiment knowing the rules. For those whom grammar education failed I give practical advice for their degree studies and beyond.

Mr Fry is far more eloquent on the subject of mean pedants than I .. do you disagree with that well educated gent?

Muphry's can't apply unless you are being mean. It's Murphy's law for rude obsessives.

If you are saying that "could of" is a typo caused by the need to respond quickly to a forum point then there isn't any problem at all.

If people write "could of" because they don't know any better, then there is a problem.

My gripe is not with people who use grammar inkorrectly so much as the use of "trash language". (Particularly by people who are paid well to communicate; e.g.  "for free", "different than" used by BBC broadcasters who are too lazy to get it right.)

For all I’ve harped on about it on here, there are a lot of people who (a) have a worse level of problems than me and (b) have had less help with them during their education.  It’s not as bad as my dad’s time when he was regarded as thick and left school with one O-level, but people still suffer quietly.

I know this because I meet them regularly and see the effects it has, and try and help them.

That is why I get angry when I see some posters on UKC laying in to others about the their spelling or grammar on here.  They’ve got no concept of how much difficulty, upset or frustration the other person has likely been through at points in their life due to the wider consequences of what lurks behind their perfectly comprehensible UKC post that nevertheless violates imperfect, ultimately arbitrary and variable (over time and space) rules.   A standard grammar and spelling is a very usefully tool don’t get me wrong.  

This justification for the lamentable state of English spelling has been fashionable for the same last few centuries. It simply does not excuse the pernicious effect that our lack of a logical orthography has on the nation's literacy. To quote James Joyce: "gee each owe tea eye smells fish." 

For years I've been telling people "ghoti" was a Shaw invention.

Wrong, apparently. Seems it was William Ollier Jr.

Shaw never used it in writing but Joyce picked up on it later.

Yes, I guess often attributed to GBS as probably the best known campaigner for spelling reform. Joyce has some typical Finnegans fun with it.

Certainly the argument has been active on both sides for a very long time, with neither side convinced by the other. (I would say "ghoti" is a highly contrived example, one which hasn't occurred in the natural language because the historical roots of words haven't placed those letter combinations together. Each of those letter combinations, and their pronunciations, in its natural setting has a family of related words within which the represented sounds can be well predicted by most speakers of English.)

I've never found the arguments for a "simplified" spelling convincing for a number of reasons. Largely because suggestions for "simplified" spelling are usually based phonetically. In which case, whose accent are you going to standardise on? Northern or southern, Dorset or Yorkshire; which particular bit of Yorkshire? Do children have to learn two dialects,their own local pronunciation and the one on which spelling is based? Or does everyone just spell according to their local accent - let's bin standardised spelling altogether?

I've also read enough examples of "improved" spelling to find them excruciatingly difficult to read with any fluency. The addition of one form of logic - generally suggested to be phonetic - subtracts another form of logic - the historic derivation. Personally, I use this historical argument because it has proved helpful to me. When I meet an unfamiliar word, I very often can see enough fragments whose meaning I *do* recognise, sometimes embedded in "superfluous" letters, to recreate the meaning of the whole.

Furthermore, English spelling is not completely arbitrary, even in its irregularities. It's just that it's not as simple as mapping one letter to one sound. The mappings are usually in the nature of programming rules: e.g. vowel sound following two consonants is different from vowel sound after one consonant. Eliminating one consonant for the sake of logic doesn't help us to distinguish "matting" from "mating" unless you want to add letters to the second to show the changed vowel, in which case you need to be sure that everyone pronounces your new vowel combination the way you expect them to. Perhaps it would be easiest if we just abandoned the English alphabet and learnt IPA? (Although then you run headfirst into the question of regional accents again.)

I see the current spelling system as akin to the Chinese writing system: a load of different (regional) pronunciations - radically different in some cases - represented by a single symbol, the word. The fact that English uses an alphabet rather than ideograms at least means that when you meet an unfamiliar word, you can either sound it out and usually get close enough to the sound of the word to deduce the right meaning, or piece its meaning together from its linguistic components.

As for the current state of illiteracy - I'm inclined to blame it on a number of factors. For example: a hostility to learning that seems present in some parts of the culture. Also, fashions in teaching - I recall a phase in which correcting children was deemed to be bad for their self esteem. Yet if corrections aren't made, no one can learn. And lastly (to be going on with) because people don't care.  As long as they feel they've expressed themselves, they appear to be not too fussed about how easy it is for their readers to understand them. And plenty of other people are willing to tell them that only a grammar or spelling Nazi could possibly wish for more clarity.

The factors above seem to tie in to what Offwidth was saying about being "mean" - I've seen corrections offered in a perfectly neutral tone being received as if they were the epitome of bullying, an outright assault on the recipient's value as a human being, how can you possibly know how hard a life they've had, etc. etc. Using unusual words or too many of them is seen as elitism; it's too much trouble to spend twenty seconds checking the online dictionary on the computer you're typing on for the spelling or meaning of any words you're uncertain of...

I could go on - I do get wound up on this subject! But you're in luck, I won't...Just one last thought:

It's easy for me to say but I sincerely believe that early exposure to language - lots and lots of language - has got to be a large part of the solution. I've heard teachers say that some children reach infant school barely knowing how to speak, because their parents haven't talked to them. This really isn't the kind of issue that's down to quirky orthography, and it must have a profound effect on the future development of these children. 

Excellent post.

You are obviously well-versed in this debate so you must know there are strong counter arguments to the points you raise. Accent is a red herring. Romance languages with far more regular and logical orthographies cope perfectly well with an enormous range of regional accents, because accent is acquired so early in life. You must also know that some illogical  spellings actually obscure the origins of words - eg the Greco-Romanising of words with Germanic roots. Reform is perfectly possible without the introduction of a new phonetic alphabet.

Ultimately, for me, all the arguments against reform pale into insignificance when set against my experience of teaching English and Linguistics for thirty years and seeing over and over again the damage done to literacy by our language's ridiculous inconsistencies. The havoc that can be wrought by the most common of our illogical and hard to master (but easy to fix!) homophones and exceptions is simply unjustifiable.

And for the record, debates in English teaching were concerned with how to correct, rather than whether. 

It's obvious that we should have calm correction of grammatical errors for those in education or training (and yes, friendly advice on when and where grammar is important). Stephen Fry rails against the writers of angry letters, the humiliators, and the lack of respect for artistic experiment. I fully support his manifesto. He is not against good grammar in its proper place.

In the UK a significant minority of our population are functionally illiterate; many are speaking a second, third or fourth language; others have formally recognised learning problems like dyslexia. Yet (I strongly suspect smaller than all of these groups), there are also some well trained and capable enough in explanation to clearly and properly describe what is wrong with "could of". What I would like to see is less focus on why such phrasing is wrong and more on where it is apropriate and polite to say so. Making calm corrections to a stranger may well be well intended but to the recipient it will normally be signalling superiority, often stirring a pot of memories of humiliation and much nastier intent. Using words you could guess they might not understand is plain rude. When you are the language expert,  use that expertise well.

Driving to the Peak yesterday I heard part of Woman's Hour... I should imagine the letters of complaint are flying into  the BBC, yet I heard passion and success through the occasionally mangled grammar. 

We brits live in a world that once we shamelessly exploited in the name of empire, leaving behind seeds that have become different forms of English. The US has regularised spelling and through its TV shows and films has considerably more influence on the wider language than our small island; India must have more English speakers than both the UK and the US put together. Each english speaking country has its own quirks. These countries alongside our UK regional accents are not normally using correct pronuciations of the same words in different ways, they make adjustments, contractions and sometimes new forms in the language. As the Malaysians would say, OK la?

I didn't know Malaysians spoke Scouse.