Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.

umanwizard 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

This article is not “blessing” anything, it’s trying to understand it. And I promise you that linguists have indeed given thought to why and under what circumstances people write “would of” instead of “would have”.

▲

leeoniya 6 days ago | parent [-]

isnt it fundamentally just a mispronounced contraction of would've

	▲	umanwizard 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, and a huge chunk of language evolution is driven by things getting confused with other things due to phonological changes making them sound the same, so studying this is squarely within the realm of linguistics. That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
	▲	cubefox 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Of course, but linguists consider themselves to be scientists, so they are only allowed to describe and explain. They can't say that anything is wrong or bad. Even "would of." Prescriptive judgements are restricted to philosophers of language.

▲

vehemenz 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This looks like a false equivalence. Why are we comparing a commonly-accepted usage, hundreds of years old, to what amounts to a spelling error?