Grammar Godmother is Getting Testy

So lately, I've been extra annoyed by people abusing apostrophes. They're using them to make words plural. They're spelling the contraction "y'all" incorrectly. They're adding them in where they simply don't belong. But thus far, I've mostly kept my mouth shut.

But now... I just saw something that made the jaw in my head drop. (That is, my actual jaw didn't drop, but if I were a cartoon, it would have.)

The culprit is a little-discussed challenge of American English. It has to do with the way we pronounce, or rather hardly pronounce, the phrase "would have". I am guessing that if you asked people what they were saying in using this phrase, a large majority would think the correct word choice is "would of".

But apparently it gets worse. Not only do we smoosh the word "have" to the point of non-recognition, evidently we do the same thing to the word "would". Case in point, from an anonymous facebook status update, "wish it had of snowed". (Emphasis mine!)

Seriously, it's no wonder people don't mind that politicans use words to mean their opposites. Apparently some portion of the American population can't be bothered to think about the meaning of the words they're using themselves. "Wish it had of snowed" does not mean what you think it means! In fact, it doesn't really mean anything at all! It is gibberish!

I sometimes wonder if the progress of literacy in this country has started moving backward. By certain measures, there is no doubt that it has. We might assume this is only bad news for publishers of books made of trees. But I think it will have much larger implications. Frequent reading is inextricably connected to the ability to think critically. Once we lose that skill, we're doomed. Dark Ages 2.0, here we come!