Should of, could of, would of

I promised you a follow up rant about these particular crimes against English, and so here it is. I'm aware that I'm not the first, nor shall I be the last to have their blood run a little colder upon reading this phrase (29,000 Google results goes some way to restoring my faith in humanity), but its recent rise in usage is somethind I find interesting (read: scary and depressing).

The first and most significant thing that strikes me about this abuse of the language is that it's purely a written phenomenon. I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you're a smart person, and like me, you can see that it originates from a mishearing of the correct contraction "should've". Now, I can understand someone hearing that, and, without paying too much attention, believing that they just heard "should of" (see this page for an interesting experiment which demonstrates just how unobservant we actually are in everyday life) and not really giving any thought to the grammatical implications of the phrase. Fine. Lazy, but understandable. The real problem arises once we write the phrase down. There's really no excuse for not reading what you've written, and even the most cursory of glances should reveal that the words "could of" make no fucking sense.

I don't mean there's an ambiguity, or that it could charitably be percieved as one of those little quirks of English that occasionally confuse non-native (and sadly, far too many indigenous) speakers. No. It just (in bold again, because this is the really salient point) makes no fucking sense.

If you don't trust me, surely you can trust the Beatles:




See? Even Scousers could get it right. I hope you're ashamed of yourself.

Seriously though, the reason it doesn't work is because "of" is a preposition, and simply cannot, under any circumstances, magically transform into part of an auxiliary verb. English just doesn't work like that. If it did, sentence construction would be impossible as we'd have no shared frame of reference with which to communicate.

Language does evolve, of course; hence the reason why you're not reading sentences like "ne ġelǣd þū ūs on costnunge ac ālȳs ūs of yfele" on this blog. But it evolves slowly and methodically, and in keeping with its already-established rules. Sure, new words enter the language every year, and we're linguistically much richer for (most of) them; but altering the meaning of some of the oldest words in the language (seriously; both of and shall are over 1100 years old) simply out of laziness or complicity is just shit.