Kind of or Kind’ve?

Do you remember when you were told in English grammar class that “would of” is incorrect? You were corrected and informed that the speaker is saying “would’ve” which is a phonetic identity of “would of”. You probably made this mistake because of the abundance of the preposition “of” in sentences that you had both vocalized and written. Also, identically spelled homophones such as “The boat rocks an alarming amount!” and “The rocks on the shore braced themselves against the currents” would further suggest that the phonetic identity indicates a spelling identity.

Recently, however, I have wondered about the validity of the phrase “kind of”:

<ohnobinki>     and he hangs out on #bangladesh kind've
<ohnobinki>     oh, btw
<zimjimmy>      hm
<ohnobinki>     I've discovered that the whole time I've been using kindeof when I should've used kind've
<zimjimmy>      ...?
<zimjimmy>      why would there be an e
<zimjimmy>      ?
<ohnobinki>     kindoef is wrong, kind've is correct
<ohnobinki>     idk
<ohnobinki>     I wondered that myself
<zimjimmy>      i never noticed you do that
<zimjimmy>      oh
<zimjimmy>      you mean kind of?
<ohnobinki>     no
<ohnobinki>     kind've=>kind have
<ohnobinki>     I kind have like pizza
<ohnobinki>     right?
<zimjimmy>      that... makes no sense
<ohnobinki>     kind of like pizza makes less sense
<zimjimmy>      um
<zimjimmy>      well
<zimjimmy>      i think it's an idiom
<ohnobinki>     maybe kind've liked pizza=> I kind have liked pizza b4
<ohnobinki>     ugh
<HonestBot>      get over it 
<ohnobinki>     only idiots use idiom
<ohnobinki>     *idioms :-)
<ohnobinki>     honestbot: no!

—2009/05/13 on #protofusion

Which reminds me—I used to spell “kind of” as “kindeof”. I thought “kind of” should be merged into one word by the agency that controls English as the W3C controls XHTML.

Of course, I was wrong to say that “kind’ve” is the correct notation for “kind of”. I recently realized that “have” doesn’t fit into sentences containing “kind of”. If such a sentence exists, it would probably change its meaning; “have” can not act as a drop-in replacement for “of” in the phrase “kind of”:

<ohnobinki> I think I'm wrong about ``kind've''
<normaldotcom> lol
<normaldotcom> waddayamena
<normaldotcom> ?
<ohnobinki> well
<ohnobinki> when people say ``it is kind of green'', they mean ``It is a kind of green''
<ohnobinki> i.e., ``it is greenish'' or ``a modified green'', which would be a ``type of green''
<normaldotcom> lol yeah
<ohnobinki> and ``have'' doesn't fit into there are all
<ohnobinki> so ``kind've''=>``kind have'' doesn't work
<ohnobinki> wp article :-DC
<ohnobinki> ?
<normaldotcom> yeah
<normaldotcom> lol sure

—2009/08/29 on #protofusion

About Nathan Phillip Brink

I'm known as ohnobinki or just binki. I'm a Gentoo user/developer who likes to break software buildsystems. Sorry, I'm a GNU emacs user too. I like to fiddle with ebuilds and C programs. I wrote difffilter to help wrangle unified diffs.