From: <brendan_murray@lotus.com>
> Otto Stolz wrote:
> > This reminds me to an observation that has puzzled me for years:
> > I have often seen native "that" written in place of "than".
>
> I can't think of anywhere this might occur, but the one that I've noticed
> keeps popping up (and is extremely irritating) is the use of "of" instead
of
> "have", as in "I could of".
I believe this one is a case of speech corrupting text.... "could have"
becomes "could've" (vulgar contraction, usually only spoken) and it sounds
enough like "could of" that people think they are saying THAT, instead.
michka
P.S. I was tempted to say THAN instead of THAT in the last sentence but
figured some people would miss the subtle (linguistically geeky) irony.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT