Could of, would of and should of

I have been coming across a strange linguistic twist lately which has piqued my curiosity. I have been noticing an increasing usage of phrases like 'could of', 'would of' and 'should of' instead of 'could have', 'would have', and 'should have' respectively. I can hazard a guess as to why this change is taking place and it has to do with a destructive force in language which is geared towards economy of effort. As time passes, words in any language coalesce together, lose their stresses in various parts, and morph in different ways to strive towards more and more efficiency of expression and communication. This is a very well documented phenomenon and is a major source of linguistic change. It is, therefore, not surprising that a sequence of words like 'could have', which occurs commonly together and is often pronounced like 'could've' due to the efficiency of expression, has now morphed to the altered spelling 'could of' (see Elision).

I wondered if there was a way by which I can verify whether this relatively new phenomenon is gaining ground. I thought that an obvious first step would be to check what Google trends says about the phrase "could of". Here is the result:

Apart from the weird peak the plot above shows a general increase in the number of searches for the phrase 'could of' since 2004. The plot below shows the Trends results for the phrase 'would of':

which again shows a general increase in the number of searches of the emerging phrase. But these plots only show that the awareness for the new terms is increasing. They don't necessarily mean that the usage is similarly increasing. To find out if the actual usage of, say, 'would of' is increasing, I did a simple Google search for the phrase and restricted the results over calendar years from 2004 to present. The results showed the number of pages in which the new phrase 'would of' was mentioned. Apart from the first few results which invariably were about how 'would of' is a misuse of the phrase 'would have', the overwhelming majority of the results were actual usages. What I mean to say is that the number of pages returned by Google for a search query 'would of' is very indicative of the relative popularity of the expression. Obviously this number by itself doesn't mean anything since the total number of pages indexed by Google each year is continuously increasing. Therefore, I normalized the number of pages returned by Google containing the phrase 'would of' in a certain year by the number of pages returned by Google for a very simple search query like 'have' in the same year. This normalizes the results and gives us a pretty good description of how the popularity of the new phrases are increasing. Here are the results for the phrases "could of', 'would of', and 'should of':

Very informative isn't it? The trends are clear and if there is something to be learned from the above then it is the fact that we are witnessing a small transition in the English language and the day may not be far when the traditional forms of the phrases discussed above remain no longer in vogue. It seems ridiculous now that somebody could have spelled could have as could of. Really, they should of more brains than that!