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Comment by base698 | Hacker News Reader

Eight or nine years ago, I lept off a tower from about 800 ft. After opening the parachute and scanning for my landing area I turned towards it to the left, which was slow and felt off. "Maybe I'll turn to the right and come around from the back", at which point the parachute collapses and spins violently from behind. I reach up and grab the left riser, the strap that connects you to the harness, and stopped the spin. When I let go the spin started again violently I again grabbed the riser and got the parachute over my head. I was descending fast below tree top level and I saw my shadow in my peripheral vision. Knees together and crash.

I immediately pat myself down to check for compound fractures. Safe.

On the ride home it was all really brought into perspective: if I didn't want to deal with such life threatening situations I'd of stayed at home. I made another couple of jumps that weekend.

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Just a nit, because I spent years not realizing this due to my accent, but it's "I'd have" not "I'd of". It sounds like "I'd of" because "I'd've"

gz on surviving the fall so that you could have random people correct your grammar in the future. Glad to hear you kept with it-- people are surprisingly risk adverse yet will ignore passive danger

Possibly the use of "I'd of" had authorial intent, e.g. to sound more colloquial. In my opinion this is valid usage in English.

There's nothing valid about it, it's a misspelling and a grammatical mistake.

It's language evolving. When the misspellings/misinterpretations of "a napron" and "an eekname" became common enough we got "an apron" and "a nickname".

If anyone — especially native speakers and others with a high degree of mastery of English — claims to have difficulty understanding "I'd of stayed home" then they're most likely being deliberately obtuse or needlessly contrarian.

The reason English speakers understand it is because "I would have" when contracted to the maximum "I'd've" sounds like "I'd of". The fact that the two are effective homonyms doesn't make both spellings right. Rather, the "of" variant just looks a little bit ignorant. Not much, just a little.

Yes, the fact that they sound very much alike is exactly what's seeping into the written language, and as any linguist (like myself) will tell you, the written language is not what drives linguistic evolution, it's the spoken language. Writing commonly lags way behind, ergo the spoken language drives evolution of the written one, not vice versa.

There's only a difference in the written word. In the spoken word, it's still "I'd've".

Yes, that's what I'm saying. They're pronounced the exact same and now the written language is starting to exhibit that very thing.

The language isn't changing along your suggested dimension of change.

People have been misspelling homonyms since the beginning of the written word. Variance in homonym spelling decreases over time, though. "I'd of" is no more likely to supplant "I'd've" than "their" is "they're" - i.e. it's just a weak signal that someone is ignorant.

Two things:

1. Examples like those involve changes in speech; there's no difference between the pronunciation of "of" and "'ve."

2. It hardly makes something correct just because you can understand it. I bet you can understand the intent of "the dog seems slieping," but it's also clearly not right.

Changes in speech drives changes in writing — every linguist will tell you that (I should know, I am one). Writing is — and always has been — way behind speech in terms of innovation.

Edit: Downvoting isn't going to change that. But you're welcome to show me an example of a linguist that claims that writing is the driving force in linguistic evolution.

I completely agree, but I can't see how that contradicts anything I just said. Using "of" here is not an example of "language evolution" any more than confusing "to" and "too" is.

I am not a linguist but you are using "evolution" as having another meaning than LilleSvin. For you it is something which is positively improving as in the layman idea about Darwin's evolution theory and for LilleSvin "evolution" means exactly what it means in biology: Changes that are at a wide scale.

For example in old Norse that was used on the north and east coasts of UK in 900 CE, "time" was not pronounced like "ta-ii-me" and the English word for "ship" was pronounced "skip", the more modern pronunciation happened after the great vocalic change, an evolution of the spoken dialect. There is nothing positive or negative in the great vocalic change, but it is an evolution of the language because after some time, most people spoke it that way, not anymore like old vikings did.

(edited because I made many spelling errors)

No, I'm not using "evolution" in some sort of Enlightenment sense where only things that contribute to the onward march of Progress count. I'm saying changes in spelling are nothing like the process of organic language evolution.

Also, one wonders why the "great vocalic change" (maybe the Great Vowel Shift, you mean) would have changed the pronunciation of the consonants leading "ship."

It most certainly is evolution. Among other things it shows a change in how "would have" is analyzed by speakers (into "would of"). They wouldn't actually be writing "would of" if it wasn't coherent with their analysis of the parts. (I feel like I shouldn't need to say that the analysis is of course subconscious, but now I did anyway.)

Re-analyses like this aren't exactly uncommon. Here are a few other examples with "would have/of": http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001291.h...

What analysis could plausibly link the word "of" with this usage?

You're both right - it's evolving the language, just like lies evolve the truth, and a kid's clumsy drawing of a flower is a creative and unique artwork. Not being flippant. There is an inherent conflict between how people want it and how it is. The future might not care either way.

To my way of thinking, questions of orthography should be thought about differently than questions of grammar or vocabulary or other spoken-language issues. After all, we all learn to speak naturally and a standards body's decrees have little effect on how we speak. On the other hand, we have to make a conscious effort to learn to read and write, and standards bodies do regularly undertake, successfully, efforts to reform spelling.

Or you know, we like to read sentences without getting cerebral SEGFAULTs

I think the word you're looking for is "at"

As in "I would at stayed home." or "I at good grammar."

I'd hate to loose a common language standard, though.

> loose

Intentionally funny, or irony?

It's a mistaken spelling of an expression, "I'd've," pronounced exactly the same way.

I've been a paraglider for a long time and have observed this pattern so many times. When we have a brush with death or lose a friend, we go flying ASAP and confront the fear immediately. You invest far too much effort and risk into fear management, to lose ground over a setback. If we really prioritized survival for its own sake, we just wouldn't fly.

I'm not and have never been a thrill seeker but it was important to me to get back on the road and confront my anxiety after getting into a fairly bad car accident so I guess I can understand the impulse.

I gave up paragliding after 3 years. Had some close calls but never got injured myself. But I saw way too many ambulances up close loading people I knew.

you mentioned seeing your shadow in your vision, what does this mean? That the way the sun was oriented compared to where you were in your fall, that you were close to the ground?

If you've jumped off something and see your shadow, you're close to the ground no matter where the sun is.

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