Quote:
Originally posted by Dorito2
Is 'play had to have' a complete sentence? Do you mean 'They' or is 'Play' someone's name?
Either way, you never say 'would of'. It should be 'would have'. "I would've gone home" actually means "I would have gone home", not "I would of."
So a) it's "Would have", "should have", "must have", "had to have", etc.
And "He would have had to have had to smoke weed to be like he was" is too long. It should be "He would have had to smoke weed to be like he was."
<i>He (would have) (had to) smoke weed [...].</i>
That's what the sentence breaks down to. (Would have) indicates the action he took ('smoke') and (had to) indicates the tense (past tense). When you break down the phrase it the parts become (would have) and (had to), not (would have had to). If you think of them as two different parts then you'll see that you don't need to add another 'had to' at the end.
So b) "He would have had to smoke weed to be like he was."
Hope that helps 
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Ok, I'll explain a little further.
Play is the name of the guy. The conversation makes sense, but the 'smoke weed' part was just left off. It's just regular every day conversation.
'Play had to have', was basically saying, 'Play had to have smoked weed'.
By me saying, 'Play would have had to have had to smoke weed' is just me asking if that makes sense. It kind of seems to make sense, grammatically, kind of, but not really.
It's kind of a bad example, but it's what made me start thinking about all this crapola.
If you look at the site i posted, it says:
"In would have had to have had the final "had" can only be a main verb. It becomes clearly ungrammatical when it's used as a further auxiliary: one of the hits was "would have had to have had to invest". I don't know how that got past a reader, but the bare presence of the word "invest" means they're probably used to reading and writing inflated gibberish. There are four examples altogether of would have had to have had to V, and one of would of had to of had to of V."
It kind of confuses me, but i guess it's saying that my example should be.
"Play would have had to have smoked weed" for it to make sense, grammatically, right?
or, yes, 'Play would have had to smoke weed' works too. I just don't like the sound of it.
Also, I think we should start putting 'to've' into our daily writings and accept it as regular grammar, since we already use it like i'ts our jobs.
Anyway, I think this kind of makes a bit more sense to me. I'll ask the hot english major at my work what she thinks about it all.