Jan Freeman on preposition dropping

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:14 PM -0400 9/10/07, Wilson Gray wrote:
>I came across "apropos NP" in the yesterday's Sunday Times and then
>lost it, damn it!
>
>-Wilson

This usage isn't that odd, is it?  I just found one on Nexis, but
from The Observer, not The (NY or London) Times:

The Observer (England)
September 9, 2007
FOOTBALL: COMMENT: Counting cost of Roman's orgy of excess
BYLINE: Paul Wilson

SECTION: OBSERVER SPORT PAGES; Pg. 18
Good to see Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional
Footballers' Association, take an eminently sensible stance on
painkilling injections. 'You shouldn't take risks,' Taylor said,
apropos Steve Gerrard's broken toe. 'I cannot approve of injections.
Managers work in the short term, but I have to see it from the health
and safety aspect.' I hope Rafa Benitez was listening. England might
not have had to spend the week worrying about Gerrard's fitness had
he not played with a jab against Chelsea.

LH



>
>On 9/9/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>>  Subject:      Jan Freeman on preposition dropping
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Nice column today by Jan Freeman in The Globe about how Brits blame
>>  preposition dropping ("appeal/battle/protest against" -> trans.
>>  "appeal/battle/protest") on the Yanks:
>>
>>  http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/09/09/yankees_win/
>>
>>  It's a nice example of what Lynne Murphy recently dubbed British
>>  Verbal Superiority Complex (mirroring American Verbal Inferiority
>>  Complex):
>>
>>
>>http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2007/09/diapers-nappies-and-verbal-inferiority.html
>>
>>  On a side note, Jan's column refers to Arnold Zwicky's ADS-L
>>  discussion of "abscond (with)" last month. That's when the list was
>>  suffering from some weird posting behavior -- Arnold's post never
>>  showed up in the archive, even though it showed up in (some?)
>>  subscribers' mailboxes. My reply to Arnold's post did show up in the
>>  archive:
>>
>>  http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0708B&L=ADS-L&P=27049
>>
>>
>>  --Ben Zimmer
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>--
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>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>                                               -Sam'l Clemens
>
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