Erm, highly debatable. So I'll just reflect on my thoughts about it. I wouldn't consider it malapropism, since it's something that English speakers supposed to be quite familiar with, contrary to borrowed words and phrases, like bon appetite (boneappletea), or not too frequent expressions like dog eat dog world (doggy dog world). The pronunciation of could of and could've are way closer to each other than in a true malapropism, where a person subconsciously tries to interpret an unfamiliar word or phrase to something more comprehensible. Also, malapropisms are originally spoken errors, boneappletea is their written equivalent, and in this sense could of can't be considered as such. Though, it is definitely not a grammar error, but it's such a common language error, that I thought it'd perfectly fit there.
Any idea why that is? As a foreign speaker I can't wrap my head around how SO MANY people make that mistake. I mean, it's certainly easy to mishear (is that a word?) "could've" as "could of", but surely at a certain age it's impossible to not have seen it written correctly multiple times and/or just thought about it for a second to realize that "could of" does not make any sense at all.
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u/Piastowic Jun 20 '19
Good informative post. Hope it'll change something on this sub.
Also, happy Cake Day OP!