intrusive"of" + pl.

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jul 14, 2012, at 5:38 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
>
> This sounds exceptionally weird to me because I'm one of the few people
> left who don't use an intrusive "of" and to whom it sounds weird and crazy
> in the first place.
>
> A CNN reporter speaking fluently: "It's lucky [the gunmen] were such
> terrible of shots."

this one is weird even for people who have "intrusive of".  doubly weird, in fact: (1) _such_ isn't an "exceptional degree marker" (doesn't trigger _a_ on the head N) -- *such terrible (of) a shot*; (2) exceptional degree marking occurs only with count singular heads (*that big (of) dogs, *how tasty (of) food, vs. that big (of) a dog, how tasty (of) a meal).

the reporter seems to have treated "such terrible shots" as an instance of exceptional degree marking (EDM) and then added the _of_ appropriate for EDM in the reporter's dialect.  i have *very* few examples of this sort ("they're not really bad of kids" is one i've mentioned before).

since you don't use intrusive _of_ (i don't either, though i've studied it a lot), the example is triply weird for you.

arnold

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