[Ads-l] Trivia WRT "far afield"

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Of."

I noticed that too.

You are correct again.

Old bean.

JL



On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Trivia WRT "far afield"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The New Yorker quotes C.E.O. Larry Page of Google as writing.
>
> "... projects far afield _from_ its search-engine roots."
>
> http://goo.gl/TGdD0c
>
>
> My initial reaction was, "That should be '... far afield_of_ [NP] ...!"
>
> Then, I second-thoughted: "Wait. 'Far afield *of* [NP]' doesn't sound
> right, either."
>
> A quickie Books-Googling finds "far afield from" from 1834 and "far afield
> of" from 1836, but there are several more instances of _of_ than of _from_.
> Only "far afield" is found, 1500-1799, modulo inconsistent spelling.
> Web-Googling finds only 114,000 raw hits for _from_ and many fewer, 39,000,
> for _of_. There are 644,000 raw hits for "far afield" followed by
> punctuation.
>
> Apparently, neither "far afield from" nor "far afield of" sounds right
> because both of them are relatively new and very rare. Page should have
> written simply,
>
> "... far from ..."
>
> Unless he's paying himself by the word, of course.
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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