intrusive "of a"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Are people so used to saying "not that big of a deal" that they've
assimilated "of a" into both "big" and "huge"?  Creating in effect two new
adjs., "bigguva" and "hugeuva"?

If true, SOTA.  (Therefore, probably true.)

JL



On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 11:31 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: intrusive "of a"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sep 18, 2011, at 8:25 PM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>
> some material deleted in transmission.  fixes:
> >
> > almost surely an intrusive "of a" (i.e. +of EDM [Exceptional Degree
> Modification marked by "of"] -- normally involving a trigger like "as",
> "how", etc., plus a modifying Adj preceding "a + N" ("how big (of) a dog").
>  three possible contributions:
>
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