A Word, Please:

I grew up in Pinellas County, Fla. It’s the birthplace of Hooters and, if a traveling insurance salesman I once met had his facts straight, it’s also the trailer park capital of the nation.

If counties had flags, ours would have depicted a Budweiser bottle crossing a Coppertone bottle. There, the best jobs I could land were waitress jobs — usually at places that serve beer by the pitcher and Chablis by the carafe.

Now I live in Los Angeles County, which contrary to what a New Yorker would tell you, couldn’t be less like Central Florida. The beaches are too cold for swimming, and people here read whole books that contain nary a single recipe for margaritas. Back in my old stomping grounds, the only thing people read were signs advertising “two-for-one well drinks.” But in California I make my living writing and editing things that get printed on pieces of paper that people actually read.

So it’s not surprising that the most common grammatical errors I encountered among the beach bums of Clearwater, Fla., are worse than the errors I come across in my new life. Back home, on the rare occasion that one of my friends picked up a pen, he or she would opt for “could of” over “could’ve” every time.

Today, I get e-mails from people interested in grammar, and the only mistake that seems to plague them is how to position periods and commas relative to quotation marks.

I’ll tackle the easy one first. I realize that the folks who most need this help won’t get it. Even if they weren’t passed out on the beach there’s no way I could get them to hear me over the Jimmy Buffet music. But here it is, anyway: There is no “could of.” There is no “would of” or “should of.”

True, it sometimes sounds as if people are saying “could of,” etc., but it’s written “could’ve.” It’s a contraction of “could” and “have,” which together form verb phrases. In “I could have sat on the beach till I glowed red,” the words “could have sat” are all working together to describe an action.