"substitute with" again

[Beverly Flanigan]

I get it all the time in student papers.  At first I thought it was just a
non-native speaker/writer error, but I think it's becoming general.  (We
talked about this a year or so ago, right?)

At 03:40 PM 3/7/2006, you wrote:
>It still sounds very odd to me, but I'm beginning to accept that it
>really is creeping into standard usage, at least for some.  I was
>looking at an impressive retrospective of Hokusai, the great 19th
>century Japanese artist, at the Smithsonian Asian museum in D.C. this
>weekend, where one of the many descriptive plaques read in part as
>follows:
>
>==========
>The image is based on a story in which Nichiren encounters a
>beautiful woman who reveals her true form as that of a seven-headed
>serpent, but in this painting Hokusai has substituted the serpent
>with the more familiar dragon.
>==========
>
>--for me, this would have had to be either "replaced the serpent with
>the more familiar dragon" or "substituted the more familiar dragon
>for the serpent".  The curatorial prose on these plaques was
>otherwise as stylistically dignified as you'd expect--no contractions
>or any trace of colloquialisms.  We're definitely tracking an ongoing
>linguistic change in formal English...  (Wilson, I weep with thee.)
>
>Larry
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org