not kind of my shtick

[James Harbeck]

>I'm guessing the quotes below from Canadian Prime Minister Stephen
>Harper mean the same as "not my kind of shtick". I can't recall ever
>hearing this word order though.
>
>"I've got to say that meeting celebrities isn't kind of my shtick, that
>was the shtick of the previous guy."

"Kind of" inserted as a sort of verbal hesitation where "really"
would also work can be heard on occasion in Canada; it's not new to
me. I wouldn't automatically assume it's an accidental repordering of
"my kind of", though it could be; I'd assume on reading it that it's
a function somewhere around "really" and "you know" (isn't, you know,
my shtick). It's pretty colloquial and a bit sloppy-sounding, though.

Another possible analysis is that it's "my shtick" that is taking on
a new syntactic role -- since we can say "isn't kind of X" where X is
an adjective (a Google search on "isn't kind of" pulls up enough of
this sort), and in some versions of slang we can say "so X" where X
is a noun ("that is so my shtick"), we might wonder whether this
instance of "kind of my shtick" is a use of a noun phrase in a
modifier role. A very interesting setup either way, and I'd love to
know for sure what's going on there.

James Harbeck.

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