A YouTube Founder’s Youniversity

Do you mean the editor changed “could of” to “could have”? And where did the “would” disappear to? I think there’s a bit of muddle in that paragraph. 
(But I’m with the editor: There is no auditory difference between “would of” and “would have,” and it would just distract me to start wondering if the visual clue meant the character would spell it “would of,” and if he’d always write it that way or just in a careless blog post or e-mail, etc. Doesn’t the “ignorant” spelling introduce a foreign element, in a sense, since in dialogue you simply wouldn’t hear it?) 

I disagree.  “Could of” speaks volumes. My students typically write “could of” instead of “could’ve” because they hear it but don’t see it in print because they don’t read. I have never seen anyone write it that way carelessly. (I am a Southerner who frequently uses the term “y’all” in informal speech but never in writing.)

In Midwestern AA meetings, at any rate, it’s very common to hear “I haven’t drank,” doubtless because drunks know that that fount of permissiveness MWCD10 says the participle is “drunk or drank.” Of course people also use “drunk” as the past tense, without authorization, perhaps because they have other things on their minds.

I think attempts at phonetic spelling tell more about the writer or, God help us, the editor than they do about the character whose character the meddler is trying to explicate. Take the standard examples tyros shoehorn into any backwoods speaker’s conversation. Even if the writer is too damned ignorant to know how “breeches” and “victuals” are pronounced, “liquor” shouldn’t be too great a challenge (see paragraph above), and nothing justifies “britches,” “vittles,” or “likker” in any context except this one. It’s like a self-inflicted Kick Me sign.

Nothing justifies the repellant and unnecessary substitution of a preposition for a contracted verb in “could of,” “should of,” “would of,” any more than a closed-up indefinite article for a verb in “coulda,” “shoulda,” “woulda,” for “could have,” “should have,” “would have” or “could’ve,” “should’ve,” “would’ve.” The connection between written and spoken English is notoriously unreliable, and funetik repprezentayshun is a will o’ the wisp in a very deep swamp.

The “lie”/”lay” confusion, I suggest, is analogous to “hypercorrectness,” in that the writer/editor is trying to avoid sexual connotation, which these days is sort of touching, but misguided.

The incorrect use of the simple past for the past participle, or the past participle for the simple past in strong verbs is a longstanding trend:  ”Ma, I shrunk the Kids!” In almost all cases, the “drank” referred to is just plain wrong if used with the auxiliary, unless a direct quote; even a comma, “or drank,’ still would have been wrong. I have no problem with using “could of,” inside quotes to indicate class, education, et al, but if a copy editor changed it within quotes, without consultation, he/she was wrong..

I could not agree more with Ms. Ferriss’s observations, and the metaphor of a painter’s palette or musician’s instrument is so apt that I’ll extend it.  The gradual erosion of understanding about how language works—both how it “should” and how it _can_ express our thoughts, experiences, hopes, histories, and fantasies—is comparable to the steady disappearance of colors from a paintbox or strings from a piano.  At one time an artist could choose from fifty different shades of blue:  azure, cerulean, cobalt, teal, midnight, turquoise, periwinkle, cyan, ultramarine, Persian, Prussian, true, etc.  Now, however, the painter opens his or her box of colors to find light blue, navy blue, and that’s it.  This poverty of choices doesn’t mean the painter can’t create a successful work of art (and how we define _successful_ is not relevant here), but it does mean that his or her range of expression is severely limited.  And while a skilled pianist can still make music on a Steinway from which every tenth string has been removed, there are countless pieces that he or she will never be able to play on that piano. 

In editing, this issue of presence/absence or abundance/lack often plays out in reverse.  It is just as important for editors and copy editors to recognize when no change is needed as it is for them to identify an error.  It is horrifying to me that a copy editor would change “would of” to “would have” when this grammatical signal was clearly the novelist’s way of giving readers significant information about a character.  Because editors can no longer presume that locutions such as “would of” are always deliberate, conscious constructions, their ability to discern when and whether to make an edit, propose an alternative, or pose a query has become even more critical.  The editor’s job is to help the author express ideas or opinions; it is not to force sentences or paragraphs into shapes that the editor considers pleasing or symmetrical or politically correct or intellectually sound or even, in some cases, logically defensible.  To do this job well requires both knowing the rules and knowing when it is not only acceptable but desirable to break them (i.e., allow the author to break them).  Without this knowledge, all the power, nuance, subtlety, vigor, and dazzling beauty of language is drained away.

As a reader, I have to say that running across “I shouldn’t of come in,” and “If I could of had her, I would of” throws me out of what is being said into noticing what’s just been said–like someone clanging a cowbell–and I would have stopped and thought to myself, “Whoa. What editor let that through?” and so much for your connection to this reader.

Who worries about sexual connotations in use of lie/lay? How ambiguous a sentence do you need to write in order for that to be a concern regardless of what “natural law” has to say about transitive and intransitive?

Once upon a time teachers would correct us when we said, “I laid down and took a nap,” since the past tense of “lie” is “lay.” Now editors (or somebody) flinches in the other direction, “correcting” the correct “I laid the book on the table” to “I lay . . .” Now, I have no idea how current “to lay” is when “to hook up” is available, so it’s just a guess that that’s the motivation.

But the bottom line is that few writers or editors seem to have much grounding in grammar or much knowledge of irregular verbs, so we see “I lay the book there yesterday,” not to mention “treaded” and “trodded” and so on, ad infinitum. Never mind such “esoteric” concepts as transitive and intransitive, when few can distinguish between “lie” and “lay” and a podium is something you stand behind rather than on and the original meaning of “beg the question” is called archaic, and nobody laughs.

Sure, part of it is the hardening of my arteries, but not all of it.

This particular character would pronounce “of,” I think, consistently. Not purely because he is a meth addict or poorly educated–though he is both–but because the particular rhythm of speech that I “hear” in phrasing the verb that way reflects the rhythm with which I imagine him talking–that is, with excessive attention to less prominent words, a drop in the jaw while speaking, a certain aggressiveness, and so on. It is possible that my intention misfires. Only readers of the fiction can tell me that, one way or the other. My point here is that the usage should be intentional; that if one of my students doesn’t know the difference between “could of” and “could have” (and many students don’t), that student will be unable to wield language to convey certain aspects of character and could end up giving the reader very mixed signals.

I didn’t really have enough time yesterday and my tone may not have adequately conveyed what I was trying to express. I have a lot of sympathy for writers trying to capture the vernacular. Even the full use of IPA symbols would only be approximation of language as it is actually spoken, so I understand the difficulties writers face. Still, while I do have a problem when writers use “eye dialect” for some characters and (formal) Standard English for others, the largest issue/problem/question I had with the post concerned the supposed loss of certain shibboleths that distinguish social types. There are two major problems that I have here. The first is that I don’t think any of the examples here really do distinguish “educated” from “non-educated” speakers of English. Jane Austen, among others, uses “drank” as the past participle for DRINK:  ”and when he had drank his tea, he was quite ready to go home” (Emma I. XV). Anyone looking at the paradigms for “lie” and “lay” would not be surprised that they are readily confused (Websters Dictionary of English Usage) has a very informed discussion of the issue). And you are not going to distinguish speakers of English in terms of how they pronounce unstressed “have.” If you feel that writing “of” rather than “‘ve” somehow better conveys the rhythm of the character’s speech that is your call, but I don’t understand how that difference in spelling is — or ever has been — indicative of a particular register within or variety of spoken English.  

The second problem is related to the first. There are numerous ways in which speakers of different classes, regions, etc. differ in speech. All you have to do is learn how to listen (although the caveat above about the difficulty of representing speech in writing still stands). The problem is that selective attention and confirmation bias leads many people to assume certain usages are characteristic of a particular social class/region, etc, when, in fact, they are used by all speakers of English in at least some contexts. Again, speaking of “loss” here is inappropriate, since these usages were never shibboleths in the first place, if you pay attention to what real people actually say. It more reflects book learning than anything else: people read in usage manuals/hear from teachers that one is supposed to speak in a certain way, and then imagine that people who do not speak in that way are somehow “uneducated.” I sometimes think people who aspire to be members of the literati are especially prone to this way of thinking. For them, distinguishing between the forms of “lie” and “lay,” between “will” and “shall,” really are the hallmarks of an educated person. But this notion of an educated person is considerably different from how “educated” is defined in sociolinguistic literature (i.e., in the sense of indicating how many years of schooling one has completed). And I think even the literati are more likely to respect these distinctions in their writing rather than in their actual speech. So while I appreciate the dilemma writers might face (i.e, what do you do when readers have uninformed opinions of how educated people should speak that differs from how educated people actually do speak?), I don’t really understand what has been “lost” from the toolbox other than linguistic stereotypes. I would think the first rule of writing is to write from life and not from usage manuals and prescriptivist grammars.  
 
(Curiously, people are sometimes much more aware of these distinctions when they learn a foreign language: I know someone learning French who wants to learn “real” French and not the artificial form taught in books but is a die-hard prescriptivist when it comes to English).

Perhaps you have not heard this sort of speaker. I have. Someone who stresses what sounds like “of,” not like “‘ve,” in his pronunciation. As I said at the outset, this is the way fiction writers listen, think, and try to convey character. My knowledge of linguistics symbols is not on a par with my knowledge of fiction writing. But the point here is not the effectiveness of my choice; the point is that I made one, rather than having written “could of” because I knew no other way.

Probably only my English grammar nerd-friends and savvy former students will relate to this……