A recent language column in the Boston Globe rehashed the same tired linguistic peeves: irregardless, fulsome, incorrect apostrophes, and so on. With an interesting exception: in the discussion of the phrase '[adjective] of a [noun]', itself not uncommon, the author gave an example that I thought just couldn't possibly be a real usage.
We're talking here about when people say things like It's not that big of a deal or He's not that good of a singer. The standard version omits of in this type of sentence. I had thought that this version, with of, only occurred in the form I've given here (not that X of a Y); with as, as in He's not as good of a singer as he thinks he is; or with how: the column gives the example People are finally figuring out how great of a place Boise is to live. In other words, they have to be comparative or degree adjectives. The example the columnist gave was this: He was a good of a farmer, or This is a hard of a class.
This sounds to me just ungrammatical (in the sense that it doesn't sound like a sentence of any type of English, not that I think it sounds prescriptively wrong). But then I don't use the other kind either, so perhaps other people do say it. I tried to google some examples. I put in double quotation marks the string "a good of a" and "a big of a". For the first one, I got a lot of hits where it was a typo for "a good or a" or "as good of a", both of which are usages I've heard plenty. With the second, I mostly got hits for language learning forums where people were asking if it was grammatical, and the kind of people that answer on there tend to be a bit unreliable - either very prescriptive or like the person who said "a big of a deal" is fine, but then when asked about it was unclear about if it was that exact phrase or something more like "not that big of a deal". So, still unsure. Let me know if you've ever heard this for real.
I've often noticed people saying or writing "not that good of a friend" or "not that big of a problem" and I'll admit to being mildly annoyed by it because it's different from how I use English (but not as annoyed as I am by newspaper articles peeving about "irregardless" and "I was like"). It presumably has its origins in confusion with constructions like "not that much of a problem" where the "of" is mandatory.
ReplyDeleteBut I've never noticed "He was a good of a farmer" and I don't believe a native English speaker would ever say that. There's nothing to get confused with because this is a perfectly simple sentence: "he was a good farmer."
Clearly someone has noticed this nonstandard construction and been annoyed by it, but wasn't able to remember the exact nature of the construction or understand when and why it occurs. But that didn't stop him from peeving about it and even concocting fake examples that ended up getting the whole thing wrong.