Éire / Ireland

It's really not an epic fail, no. We learn by reading, by speaking. If you hear someone say "could've", it sounds identical to "could of". It's a very understandable mistake.

Firstable, alot of people make innocent errors and mispellings, when they type fast, haven't learned good language yet, use and hear phrases but never seen them written out, ect. Irregardless, they mustard up the courage and took their time to share they're thoughts, which were rather clear and understandable, for all intensive purposes. I imagine your original response to this misunderstanding was an attempt to nip it in the butt, but most Lemmings who understood the message could care less.

Categorizing this example as "a pretty epic failure" is prohibitively harsh, and only serves to make Lemmings less likely to post if they aren't totally confident in their mastery of whichever language they're using. In fact, I'd argue that your use of "to be fair" is inaccurate as it is not a fair assessment, mainly due to your overexaggerated condemnation of an error that plenty of other users easily parsed.

More to the point, to be fair, "had to have [past participle]," or a past modal, is a rather unintuitive part of speech, and I'd argue that its clunky nature is why people are less likely to read it than to have heard it conversationally. As a child, people heard "you shouldn't've done that," and adopted it as a part of speech, but many people never took the time to break down the meaning of the phrase. English isn't exactly the easiest language (e.g., our obsession with inverting sentences for dramatic effect), so it's unsurprising when malapropisms appear in the wild, or are all smashed into one mildly irritating paragraph like the first one in this comment.

If your goal is to educate other users and attempt to slow down the ever-evolving nature of language, simple suggestions and courteous comments tend to work better than labeling an innocent comment as a failure. If you truly didn't understand part of a comment, insulting the commenter is unlikely to garner a response. Your comments only serve to restrict how approachable users find Lemmy, or to prove that you are indeed the smartest one in the conversation.