from = for, of.

[Jonathan Lighter]

I often see the same usage on other English-language sites but was only
moved to fury yesterday.

Will post more of them in the spirit of SOTA.

Some old friends of mine - a high-school teacher and a technical editor -
mentioned without prompting recently that they've been noticing "very odd
uses of prepositions" in otherwise (more or less) competent writing by
people like administrators and scientists. They wanted to know if I'd
noticed the same thing, and I had to agree.

I can't be any more specific, but my impression  is that "of," especially,
is suffering in various constructions.

JL (from an undisclosed location near the heart of darkness)

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 6:13 AM, Damien Hall <djh514 at york.ac.uk> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Damien Hall <djh514 at YORK.AC.UK>
> Subject:      from = for, of.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thus Jon:
>
> >Amazon.com heads some pages of customer reviews like this:
> >
> >"This review is from: Beowulf (Mentor) (Paperback)"
>
> Looks to me like a bad translation of something written in French or German
> or Spanish (or any one of a great number of languages which have the same
> lexeme covering some of the meanings of 'for' and some of the meanings of
> 'of'). There's no reason why such a bad translation should appear on
> Amazon's pages in particular, except the following: I sometimes receive
> e-mails from Amazon's German site. To my recollection I have never bought
> anything from it (not speaking German well), but it is possible that books
> I have bought through the Amazon sites in languages I do speak have in fact
> come from Germany, especially since I have been living in Europe, without
> necessarily saying that that was where they were being sold from. If so,
> might this be an auto-translation of a site originally in the language of
> the country where a particular book was being sold from? I think Jon
> doesn't live in Europe, but might this convoluted reasoning apply here? I
> feel compelled to be a little bit convoluted because I can't see why
> Amazon, an American company as far as I'm aware, wouldn't have English
> native speakers writing its English-language output as a default; and
> 'from' for 'for' or 'of' isn't the kind of mistake that a native speaker
> would make, surely?
>
> Second possibility (maybe more likely?): a Hispanic American
> second-language speaker of English wrote this particular line, and it
> wasn't checked by a first-language speaker?
>
> Damien
>
> --
> Damien Hall
>
> University of York
> Department of Language and Linguistic Science
> Heslington
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