Past participles

Grammatical pedantry of the day:

The past-tense form of ‘to lead’ (with a long ‘e’) is ‘led’, not ‘lead’ (with a short ‘e’).

(Technically speaking, both the simple past tense and the past participle are ‘led’.)

This particular issue probably doesn’t affect understanding all that much, but it does cause my mind to wedge momentarily every time I see it. Really, it serves as a good example of why English orthography is in serious need of reform. (That is, English spelling is stink.)

I bring up the point because I’ve seen the aforementioned incorrect usage independently in at least two geek blogs: The Daily WTF and Roughly Drafted.

Another strange perturbation of language involving past participles also presents itself to me regularly: people (particularly Minnesotans, and perhaps other Midwesterners) saying and writing ‘would of’ in place of ‘would have’. Example:

Incorrect: “I would of gone if it weren’t so expensive.”
Correct: “I would have gone…”

This is probably because of the Minnesota accent, which finds it difficult to pronounce “would’ve” as, for example, a Brit would, and instead inserts a vowel where the apostrophe is.

One might get the impression that I’m a prescriptivist (that is, a language nazi), but I’m really not—I just want people’s usage to actually make some sort of sense. If you consistently change the perfect tense to use ‘of’ instead of ‘have’, fine by me. But you’ll have trouble communicating with some people that way, and your English usage will be less universal.