report into

[Mark Mandel]

Or a mishearing of
 - "reporting to" or
 - "report in to", which in turn would be from "report in", with a
pleonastic particle.

m a m

On Dec 25, 2007 11:17 AM, James Harbeck <jharbeck at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> I've noticed "report into" in place of "report to" in a corporate
> restructuring description -- as in "[manager X] will report into
> [manager Y]" and "[manager Y] will report into me."
>
> I find that "will report into" gets 43,500 Google hits. ("Will report
> to" gets 3,770,000, but of course not all of those are parallel to
> this usage.)
>
> I'm inclined to think this is a result of a slight shift in the
> conceptualization of the relationship -- boss as destination or
> repository rather than just as recipient or node -- but it could also
> be a shift in the way "to" is seen; it might be that it's not firm or
> emphatic enough anymore, or that it's seen as ambiguous (perhaps as
> temporally bound).
>
> James Harbeck.
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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