Six short videos about language

How slang catches on, survives, and fades:

 

The schwa is never stressed? Ridiculous, says Geoff Lindsey:

‘Answer’, a swear in plain sight

Some familiar words have etymologies right in front of us yet apt to stay hidden. Breakfast breaks a fast, the vowels disguising it well. Remorse is ‘biting back’, your conscience gnawing at you. Semicolon is a folk etymology of samey colon, on account of its resemblance to the other mark.

OK, I made that one up.

I read a nice account of another such etymology in Geoffrey Hughes’s Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanities in English (1991). The book packs considerable detail, scholarly insight and amusing lists into its 280 pages, so I’ll follow its lead and keep this post short.¹

In a section on ‘numinous words: charms, spells and runes’, Hughes writes:

One of the most dramatic instances of the use of a malign spell in Anglo-Saxon literature is wrought by the monster Grendel [in Beowulf].² Described as one of the evil tribe of Cain and an enemy of the Lord, he puts a spell on the weapons of his victims, the Scyldings. The key verb in the text at this point is, fascinatingly, forsworen, literally ‘forsworn’, indicating that the verb forswerian could mean ‘to hinder by swearing; to render powerless by incantation; to make useless by magic’.

Hughes goes on to relate other examples of such word-magic from the Life of St Wilfrid and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Then he quotes from The Battle of Maldon and picks up the -swear- thread again:

A funny kind’ve spelling

Earlier this month I wrote about the military acronym strac, which I came across in Robert Crais’s novel L. A. Requiem (1999). Something else I noticed in that book was this curious spelling:

“That was kind’ve goofy, wasn’t it […]?”

Obviously a nonstandard rendition of kind of; I made a note of it and kept reading. Being on a winter binge of detective fiction, I read Michael Connelly’s The Last Coyote (1995) soon after that and saw the same strange form, this time repeatedly:

“I’m kind’ve freelancing on an old case, Leroy.”

“We just kind’ve sparred around for a few minutes but then I left him something.”

“It’s kind’ve like the more they push one way, the more I push the other.”

“Kind’ve an undercover thing.”

“Well, it was kind’ve like one of those Catch-22 situations.”

So we see its use isn’t limited syntactically: it can modify adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc. – but always in dialogue, at least from the two authors I’ve seen use it so far.

Kind’ve for kind of presumably arises because of the phonetic equivalence of unstressed of and ’ve in speech – the /əv/ sound is misanalysed when put on the page, perhaps deliberately to convey a character’s earthiness or unsophistication. It’s a sort of inverse of the would have → would of variation I wrote about last year (and have since updated with additional literary examples).*

A quick online search shows that kind’ve is not uncommon in informal language. A couple of people at Yahoo! Answers call it an acceptable colloquialism, but the majority don’t. (Another option, kinda, drops the v sound, so it wouldn’t necessarily be an accurate transcription.)

Kind’ve and company are an understandable development, but an unsound one in my view – despite appearing in edited books by well-known writers. My advice is to avoid kind’ve: there are other ways to convey informality, and it’s more likely readers will be confused, annoyed, or distracted by this kind of orthographic meddling.

What do you think?

*

* Speaking of which, an Urban Dictionary definition says sort’ve is “the new would of!” and notes sarcastically that it “serves to demonstrate that “have” and “of” are now completely interchangeable”.

Would of, could of, might of, must of

When we say would have, could have, should have, must have, might have, may have and ought to have, we often put some stress on the modal auxiliary and none on the have. We may show this in writing by abbreviating to could’ve, must’ve, etc. (Would can contract further by merging with the subject: We would have → We’d’ve.)

Unstressed ’ve is phonetically identical (/əv/) to unstressed of: hence the widespread misspellings would of, could of, should of, must of, might of, may of, and ought to of. Negative forms also appear: shouldn’t of, mightn’t of, etc. This explanation – that misanalysis of the notorious schwa lies behind the error – has general support among linguists.

The mistake dates to at least 1837, according to the OED, so it has probably been infuriating pedants for almost 200 years. Common words spelt incorrectly provoke particular ire, sometimes accompanied by aspersions cast on the writer’s intelligence, fitness for society, degree of evolution, and so on. But there’s no need for any of that.