President Clinton . . . had his clear shot at health-care reform, if we need it, he and his wife, but they blew it. As Mrs. Clinton might say, woulda coulda shoulda.
[S]uch a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts.
[H]e was talking about last night’s game and what it would have meant to have this roster last spring. . . .
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda” he started. “If ifs and buts were candies and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas, right?”
References
↑ Cf. William Safire ("On Language," New York Times, May 15, 1994): "The order of words in this delicious morsel of dialect varies with the user. . . . In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened. . . . Taken together, the term means 'Spare me the useless excuses.'"