Beware the I’ds

Going over a standardized test with an American high schooler, I was asked: How do you know when the contraction “I’d” means “I had” versus “I would”?

I thought that it was obvious from context and said as much.

Consider:

“I’d closed the door but forgotten to lock it.”

Here, “I’d” is obviously “I had,” indicating one past action occurred before the other, plus the third form of “forgot” indicates that “had” precedes “closed.”

Compare with:

“I’d lock the door before closing it”

In this sentence, “I’d” must be “I would,” meaning that this was either a habit or hypothetical situation.

Thinking more about it, though, I realized that this construction might be causing people trouble when forming conditional sentences.

Let’s look at a sentence about stocks:

“If I’d bought shares in that company, I’d have a lot of money today!”

Now consider this slightly different sentence:

“If I would have bought shares in that company, I would have a lot of money today”

Does this sound OK?

Technically, it’s incorrect: to form the third conditional, it should read “If I HAD bought shares in that company, I WOULD HAVE a lot of money today”

I hear this all of the time — two woulds, zero hads.

However, when it comes to the written word, authors and editors seem to be on point:

Even American English hardly trucks with this mistake:

I’d assumed that most grammar errors in Russia, where I primarily teach, come from translation mistakes.

Now, however, I can see that misunderstanding meaning can come from ambiguous features of punctuation too.

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