More on substituting

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:40 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> Fox News reports that workers at the Ground Zero site have been getting
> drunk on their lunch hour, "taking lunchtime at the local pub, substituting
> food for shots and suds!"
>
> The line, as part of a quick news summary, was evidently scripted and not
> spontaneous.
>
> So ol am I that even though I get the idea, I still can't "make sense" of
> the syntax. It's nightmarish.

this is a return to the topic of reversed "substitute" ("substitute" OLD "for" NEW), branching off from the possibly related topic of PREFERRED "is no substitute for" DISPREFERRED.  as i said here  only four months ago:

 >we've had this discussion (often at length) on this list several times since 2004, and i posted a compact account on Language Log in 2007.  (so it's not really helpful or informative to tell the list again, and again, how much you *hate* "innovative substitute" or "reversed substitute", how you can't understand them, etc.  they're not going away, no matter how often you rant about them.)<

i really don't see the point of people's bringing up every occurrence of a variant they just hate, when this variant is not an inadvertent error, is already widespread, and is spreading further, and especially when the variant is been discussed many times on this list.  do people really think that if they complain about every occurrence that comes to their attention, they'll convince others to stop using the variant -- that ranting will make it go away?  especially, do people *on this list* (devoted as it is to dialects and variation) think that way?  (peevers and word-ragers and so on seem to think this is so, but people on this list?)

if so, we can expect avalanches of sightings of:

  "of"-marked exceptional degree modification ("too big of a dog");

  nominative conjoined objects ("between you and I");

  double "is" (Isis) ("The problem is is that ...");

  intensifying "literally" ("I was literally out of my mind");

  speaker-oriented (sentence modifier) "hopefully";

  WH+"that" complements ("I wonder how many people that were at the party");

and much much more.  oi.

arnold

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