[Ads-l] intrusive "of"

[Wilson Gray]

"I wasn’t SMART ENOUGH OF AN ACTOR to let the movie be, whereas Keanu was.”

Y'all are really serious, when you assert that there's something really odd
about this sentence and others of its type. As y'all say, "Wow. Just...
wow." I really have a very difficult time accepting that. Not in accordance
with prescriptive grammar, of course. But, a feature so weird and so
unheard of that it deserves its own blog articles, despite the fact that
millions of people use it every day and probably have been, for centuries?!

 And then there's the mealy-mouthed pswaydo-euphemism, _n-word_. "Bah!
Humbug!" John McEnroe said it best:

"You can not be serious!"

I'm beginning to feel out of place.

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 10:05 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      intrusive "of"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> here in ADS-L, now posted about on my blog:
>
> http://arnoldzwicky.org/2016/01/23/fun-with-edm/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-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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