think your way thin

Michael Israel michael.israel at GMAIL.COM
Thu Apr 12 02:48:09 UTC 2007


The NPR webpage announces their segment on
Judith Beck's book "Think yourself segment"
but the announcement I heard on the radio
has it as "Think  your way thin."

This appears to be novel extension of the English
"way" construction, as in "They hacked their way through
the shrubbery" or "He wormed his way into her heart."

The construction has been very productive for a long time
but I've only ever seen it with prepositional phrase and
adverbial complements, never before, as far as I know,
with an adjectival complement. Of course, there are lots
of examples where a PP complement has a metaphorical
meaning, denoting a state rather than a location, (as in
"wormed his way into her heart"), so perhaps it's not
such a stretch to find an adjectival complement or too.

But is it in fact a new stretch? Has anyone else noticed
examples like this before?

-mi

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