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Comment by vgaldikas | Hacker News Reader

SilkRoad guy would of loved this :D

Ross Ulbricht, who was apprehended at a public library while logged in to various accounts. As I recall a plain clothes agent distracted him while others then tackled him.

("would've", not "would of")

Other English speakers I know complain about our orthography: bought, caught, draught, etc. But, yet, here we are with a “word” pronounced “of” and spelled “‘ve”! Now that’s awful orthography!

In case you're serious and unaware: it's a contraction of "would have," hence the apostrophe. It's not a single word spelled weirdly.

It's not pronounced "of", it's more like "ev", exactly like the contraction of words it's made up of. Would have.

əv

In my household I'm the English nerd, although I have no degree behind it. I'd correct my wife when she wrote "would of" but then I listened closer when she talked: She wasn't saying "would've" she was saying "would of".

That's when I gave up. There are a million other reasons to love my wife, and her proper use of 'would've' wasn't one of them to begin with :)

Does your wife actually pronounce these differently? Small sample size but as far as I can tell I pronounce these identically. (CA - native speaker)

She does not. They are the same to her. We're also native speakers from the Reno NV area, which is heavily influenced by Sacramento and San Francisco language.

To me "would of" and "would've" are pronounced exactly the same.

If I said "would ev" that would sound weird. It would sound very similar to "whatev":

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=whatev

Well, nothing else in english is pronounced like it is written, so I don't think this is a good reason to misspell things.

I agree completely. No one should write "would of".

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti

The word should be pronounced the way the contraction actually is would (ha)ve.

But people are lazy. And words like caramel get blurred over. Or the one that bugs me the most of saying ‘ta’ instead of to.

My favorite is the Futurama universe where the word ask is official changed to ax instead.

others have covered the correct full form, but to the issue of the pronunciation, it's not pronounced "would of" it's MISpronounced "would of". You can make any weird confusing pronunciation you want out of anything if you're willing to say it "wrong". The correct pronunciation of the contraction, as another hinted at is basically "would have" without the h and the a becoming an sound "uh" instead of an "ah" sound.

According to the book "American Kingpin", they had worked their way into the administration staff for the Silk Road, and used the site admin IM chat to ensure that he was using his laptop and actually signed into his account before rushing him in the library.

Yup. Simple approach that was very effective.

That's pretty impressive.

This article goes into pretty good detail of his takedown https://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

After that incident I basically wrote this program in java that monitors a usb port for a device with a given ID. If it does not find it then it locks the computer.

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