The Concrete And The Clay Beneath My Feet

There are many reasons why the brief and scarce hours spent with the Pocket Sex Goddess are so precious. She has, for one, no idea why she has that nickname and regardless of what she thinks, she’s wrong; she can drink me under the table; it does my ego no end of good to be seen with her; and she has the same slightly finicky approach to grammar as do I.

We’re both familiar with the concept of English being a fluid creature, ever evolving as common usage, hateful though it is, tweaks a definition here or a sentence structure there. We’re both open to neologisms even though they may have the aesthetic qualities of the new Routemaster bus.

However, we both have lines we feel should not be crossed. Mine is the less vs. fewer’ thing. I don’t care about what Stephen Fry says and I don’t give a damn about supermarket express checkouts; when it comes to a lesser number of countable nouns, it’s ‘fewer’. Yes it is. Don’t argue.

Hers is just as simple; the use of the words ‘could of’ or ‘should of’ in place of ‘could have’ or ‘should have’. I can’t help but agree and indeed did, loudly and joyously, when she brought it up. Just because something sounds as though it could be spelled in a certain way, there’s no reason it should be. We have homophones and homographs and all the many joys of this language and we should embrace each of them like a kitten that’s just come in from the rain.

Today, though, finding myself with a few hours of virtual house arrest as I waited for a phone call which, though promised, never came, I amused myself by tidying up, by taking photographs of the cat, and by thumbing through my copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage And Abusage.

This is what Partridge has to say:

would have, in conditional sentences, is incorrect for had, as in ‘If he would have wished, he could have spared you a troublesome journey’.

The ground turned to quicksand, all that was once certain turned to dust. Both the PSG and myself had been arguing for what we thought was correct, and both of us were wrong. Looking at Partridge’s edict, it seems the same rule, based as it is on the past tense of ‘have’, also applies to ‘could have’ when used in the past tense. .

So now we have to re-train ourselves to say ‘would had’ and ‘could had’, and to contract them to ‘would’d’ and ‘could’d’.

Which, if you ask me, are small prices to pay for our continued ability to annoy the hell out of others.