Of/Have
This is one I’ve started seeing used incorrectly fairly often in print. Confusion around the use of these two in phrases such as ‘should have,’ ‘would have,’ ‘could have,’ no doubt arises from the contracted forms:
should’ve
would’ve
could’ve
Now I see in print “I should of” or “We could of” when no doubt the writer meant “I should’ve” or “We could’ve.” They sound the same when you say them, but they are completely different. “Of” is a preposition (I know, we’re getting technical), whereas ‘have’ is one of the three helping verbs: have, be, and do.
Let’s just try substituting one for the other in a less ambiguous context. For instance: You wouldn’t say “We of been here for an hour.” You would say “We have been here.” Similarly, you couldn’t say “She thought have him,” but you would say “she thought of him.” Hopefully this shows that they’re not interchangeable.
Lose/Loose
Under most circumstances, one is a verb, the other is an adjective. “Lose” is the verb. You can lose your keys, lose your mind, lose your lunch. If you lose something, it’s lost. Until it’s found.
Loose is, most often, an adjective. Loose rhymes with goose. You can have a screw loose, in which case you might lose it. If you lose weight your clothes will feel loose (how nice).
There are other uses for each word that you can look up in any dictionary of your choosing, but these are the most common situations where these two get mixed up.
DD,
Yes! The “should of” has been driving me nutty. I’m seeing that more and more lately. It never seemed to be such a common mistake before.
I’m not sure how this got started, and I hesitate to continually blame our fast-paced, social-networking driven society, but I really think this is yet another symptom of the Instant Message text-speak. When I use the ‘predictive text’ to send a text message from my phone, the apostrophe is not an option. I have to take it out of predictive mode to be able to access an apostrophe, or you do without it. You can imagine how much I like the latter option. It encourages sloppy grammar, and lazy habits.
Most of my students seem to agree that the problem comes from the fact that “should have” “should’ve” and “should of” all sound very similar when spoken aloud. When I ask them “which one is the VERB?!” they usually realize that HAVE is a verb, whereas OF is not, so when I explain that we are all too smart to use “of” as a verb, the problem is ameliorated if not 100% solved.
It just seems, I don’t know, astonishing, that they even need to have it explained to them. I know language skills have been on the decline for some time (Gypsyscarlett and I are opining about letters and diary skills on her blog) but at this pace, people will be nearly unintelligible in print in another 20 years.
When I interviewed for the job I have now (actually it was the part-time version of the gig I am now doing full-time, at the same school) I asked the head of the department what their take was on teaching grammar. He was very enthusiastic about showing me the text they used, even though one of the other candidates at the meeting seemed genuinely surprised that college students would need that info – we both said “you’d be surprised!”
In this case, I don’t blame just texting (and believe me, I agree that Predictive Text is the language of the devil,) but that whole crappy No Child Left Behind obsession with standardized testing. You can’t blame the grade school/high school teachers for “teaching toward the test” – they can lose their funding and sometimes their jobs if they don’t – but you can’t teach grammar or sentence structure or analytical exposition when all the kid has to do is choose a fixed number of correct answers on a multiple choice test in order to “excel.”
I know this sounds ridiculously elementary, but every time somebody gets the right answer on a grammar question in my class, I ask them to explain to the rest of the class HOW they knew it was correct – this is not something you ever have time think about on the multiple choice tests, and as a result, the high-scoring students just get the smug idea that they can “feel” proper grammar, and the weak students start to think it’s bullsh!t because nobody can be bothered to explain the diff between a good sentence and a lousy one.
Weeeellll… in defense of the ones who can’t always explain it, I can’t either!
I really attribute a lot of my language skills to being an avid reader, and the constant repetition of seeing things written correctly. This is why it baffles me when people who do read a lot still can’t spell or speak properly. I can explain the basics but there are finer points that I do sort of simply ‘know.’ I know that sounds lame, but I was never much good at diagramming sentences either.
That said, yes, the standards are in the toilet these days. And it still makes my head hurt that they don’t teach phonics anymore in elementary school. I can still remember learning that stuff in second grade. I don’t know how I would have learned anything without that grounding in basics.
I’ll bet you could explain most of it if you had to – I’ve seen you do it casually. I don’t make them conjugate verbs or memorize all the prepositions, but I expect them to know how to use ‘em. Spelling – well, that might be genetic – I know some very smart people who are lousy spellers.
How do they teach reading without phonics? I wouldn’t know where to begin.
It boggles the mind. Maybe that goes a long way toward explaining why so few kids read today, or are lousy spellers. I couldn’t even believe it was serious when I first heard they didn’t teach phonics anymore. I guess that’s when that mail-order program, Hooked on Phonics, came out to fill in the gaps. To me, it’s such a fundamental step in learning to read, write, and spell.
My 8 y.o. nephew could read long before he started school, and I’m pretty sure it’s because his mom kept those magnets shaped like letters on the refrigerator, and kind of informally taught him phonics every time she read to him. I just can’t figure out how else you’d teach it.