disappearing prepositions

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 26, 2004, at 11:26 AM, Robert Wachal wrote:

> When I was growing up a loooong time ago, if someone died, it was said
> that
> they "passed away". Now everyone seems to say, "they passed".
>
> We used to say "pissed/shit in their pants," now it's "pissed/shit
> their
> pants"
>
> Once people spoke of "being graduated from college', later "graduating
> from
> college"; now it's "graduated college".

i believe these three have entirely independent histories; there is no
general tendency to eliminate prepositions in informal english.
anyway, the "away" of "pass away" is a particle, not a preposition.

MWDEU has very informative entries for "pass" and "graduate" (and also
the preposition "absent", below, which it finds only in legal contexts
in its earliest cites -- ron butters, take note).

"pass" 'die' and "pass away" 'die' have both been around since the 14th
century, apparently, though "pass away" pretty much fell out of use
until the 19th century, when it had a revival.

"graduate college" seems to be a 20th century innovation.

"piss/shit one's pants" i don't have information on, though i take
these to be idioms, without the syntactic openness of "V in one's N",
for various evacuative verbs V (urinate, piss, pee, piddle, defecate,
shit, crap, dump,...) and various garment nouns N (pants, underpants,
briefs, underwear, jeans, trousers, shorts, pajamas, loincloth,...).
[though idioms are always straining to extend to extend to new lexical
items, so i wouldn't be surprised to find "V one's N" has more
possibilities for some people than it seems to for me.]  "piss/shit
one's pants" might have been influenced by "dirty/soil/wet one's
pants", but this is just speculation.

in any case, i have a feeling that "piss one's pants" and "piss in
one's pants" aren't *quite* the same in meaning (though the real-world
result is the same), but i'm not at the moment able to articulate the
difference.

> And what does the new preposition 'absent' have to offer that 'without'
> lacks?

maybe it's time for me to exhort people to check out MWDEU before
asking usage questions.  i have to consult it so often for ADS-L
purposes (as well as for the usage/prescriptivism courses i
occasionally teach) that i now have three copies: one at home, one at
my office, and one at the stanford office where i meet students (it's
really martin kay's office, but i store some things in one corner).

arnold, who actually types things in out of books more *slowly* than
most people and would prefer that other people look stuff up on their
own  (and notes that Garner's MAU is a useful supplement to MWDEU)