One of pet hates is when people write “should of” instead of “should have”.   While the targets of this site‘s ire are all worthy enough (and thanks to Damian for bringing it to my attention on Twitter the other day) the author should have ((see. Not too difficult was it?)) made some room for “should of”.
I did a Google search on “should of” just now. It returned 2.5million results. The first was from a site complaining about the usage. So was the second. In fact the first five results were from grammar blogs, moaning about the usage, and then it went downhill. I suspect that at least 2,499,900 of the results are from sites where the writers are totally unaware of the error.
Let’s get rid of all the web pages where people are moaning about this, by googling “should of” -“should have”, and we find only 1.7 million web pages commit the sin. That means over a million people are whinging about it!
Sod it. Back to elementary maths for me.
A mere rounding error.
However, the presence of both phrases does not necessarily mean a complaint. It could be a thread on a message board, or a group blog, or a search result on an aggregator site, where one person uses the correct phrase and elsewhere on the page another user is a drooling illiterate.
Could even be a page containing “should have” and elsewhere something like “I should, of course, wash my hands after using the toilet”
Nice to see an engineering approach to it though.