Discussion Groups / British English / September 2008

I think I've heard it before. It sounds clumsy to me too. Be thankful
that at least it was "would have" rather than "would of"!

I have a vague feeling that in the backwaters of English usage, it's
not unprecedented to encounter things like "Would he have tried
harder, he would have won".  But I could be imagining it.

But there is the archaic-sounding "Would I had known!" which I know
I've seen.

_Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage_ has the following to
say about "would have" in place of "had":

   The use of _would have_ in place of _had_ in the protasis
   of a conditional sentence (as in "If they would have come
   earlier, we could have left on time") has been cited as an
   error in books on usage since at least 1924 (Barland
   Greever & Easley S. Jones, _The Century Collegiate Handbook_).
   Such usage appears to be a characteristic of informal speech,
   in which it may often occur in a contracted form ("If they'd
   have come earlier ...").  Our evidence indicates that it does
   not occur in standard writing that finds its way into print,
   but it is notorious in student writing and therefore a
   staple of college handbooks even today.

As for the 1924 date, I find the following in a 1907 book, _Handbook
of Composition_, by Edwin C. Woolley, PhD, Assistant Professor of
English in the University of Wisconsin:

   Would have.  Often incorrectly used in _if_ clauses instead
   of _had_.

      Wrong: If he would have stood by us, we might have won.
      Right: If he had stood by us, we would have won.

It's been grating on my ear for years. I have the impression that it
originated 'over there', and I wonder if there's some influence from
other languages, like German. The identical (wrong) construction
happens ever more frequently in Icelandic, where the grammar is so
complicated that teachers in this permissive age may be giving up on
drumming it into their unwilling pupils and faulty usage goes
uncorrected. Could it be that the same is happening in German, so
that it eventually rubs off on to native English speakers?

...

I noticed it a long time ago, particularly with US speakers, and often
accompanied by a bizarre sequence of tenses that is nothing like
anything I learned at school in English, Latin or any other language.

Graham Gooch on Test Match Special seems to revel in this sort of
'would-en' English, and he probably spells it 'would of'.

Another way the Americans have of using 'would' goes sonething along the
lines of 'Whenever he would come into town he stayed at the Ritz.' I
can't remember the precise construction, but sounds the wrong way around
to a naive northerner.