Tibs wrote to me in October 2020:
A few years ago, Americans started adding “of” in places it didn’t occur before. It gradually spread into books, and across the atlantic to here as well.
I don’t have an exact timing - less than 10 years?
I find it hard to remember examples, because it’s become part of the scenery, but it’s always a case where leaving out the “of” leaves the meaning identical
For instance: not that big [of] a deal ... as ordinary [of] a childhood as possible (this one from The Boys on Netflix)
My apologies, Tibs, for making you wait so long. Here we go!
What is it?
- an adverbial element (e.g., as, how, quite, so, this/that, too) that's indicating 'measurement' of the adjective
- a gradable adjective (i.e. the ones that can go with those 'measurement' expressions)
- of [which is not there in the older form]
- an indefinite noun phrase: usually one starting with a or an like an idea or a child; more unusually, you can find it with an indefinite (i.e. bare) plural or, even more rarely, a bare non-count noun [see examples 3 and 4 below, respectively].
- cacao provides habitat that is of as high of a quality as their natural forests (wisc.edu)
- Seems like I took too long of a break.(ER [tv])
- no matter how great their sacrifice or how big of heroes they might be (comment on a CNN blog)
- I asked him about how big of threat is ISIS to America's national security (CBS Face the Nation)
Why did people start saying it?
In analogical change, one pattern or piece of the language changes to become more like another pattern or piece of the language, where speakers perceive the changing part as similar to the pattern or piece that it changes to be more like. (2020: 87)
How much of a problem is that going to be? Too much of a problem.
When did people start saying it? And which people?
Harold Allen named The Big of Syndrome in the mid–late 1980s (he had died in 1988 before his [AmE linguist-speak] squib was published in American Speech). Allen had noticed expressions like this big of a crowd and that nice of a day ("an innovating syntactic aberration") in the Minnesota speech around him, and urged linguists to study it further. Linda Rapp took up the call and published another short article in 1991.
Rapp found several examples from 1943 in Harold Wentworth's 1944 American Dialect Dictionary. Wentworth's examples seem to be from West Virginia and central Florida. Another early-ish example (1962) comes from The Andy Griffith Show, which takes place in a (fictional) small town in North Carolina. So those seem like hints that it might have come from the inland southeast.
But since, unlike Rapp, I'm working in the Age of Linguistic Corpora, I've been able to find some earlier examples. These are from the Movie Corpus.
| 1932 | US/CA | The Death Kiss |  |  |  | If I'm any good of a guesser, he ought to be here by now. |
| 1939 | US/CA | The Little Princess | | | | a cup of tea? - Oh no thank you. We're in too big of a hurry. Oh, I see. |
| 1942 | TV/MOV | Lure of the Surf | | | | All right. Here. (Miles) I really think it's not that big of a deal. |
I had a quick look for the screenwriters' birthplaces—The Death Kiss = Alabama and Hungary and The Little Princess = California and Wisconsin. No one will admit to writing Lure of the Surf (which was apparently mocked for promoting sea fishing while sensible people were worried about U-boats), but the 'self-narrator' was from the Bronx. So, only one of those writers fits with the inland-southeast origin story. All of this is pointing to it being widespread in spoken American English even earlier. If people were saying it in (orig. AmE) movies without comment in the 1930s, it must have felt at least somewhat natural by then.
Still, before the 1980s, the corpus examples are few and far between. Allen wrote about the "syndrome" just as this pattern was finding real purchase in published English as well as spoken, with that big of a deal leading the way:
Tibs thought he'd only heard the pattern in the past decade. That could be due to Recency Illusion, or it could be that people in Britain just didn't hear it (or read it) much until the internet age. Sticking with big and deal (because the numbers are easiest to see), we can see it really taking off in the 2000s in published and performed American English. (Sorry, the text in these screenshots is not very clear, but know that the darker the blue, the more typical of a decade the phrase is. We can see big of a deal strongly associated with the 2000s, and much more so the 2010s. Neither of these corpora go into the 2020s.)
 |
| big of a deal in COCA |
 |
| big of a deal in The Movie Corpus |
Just to underscore the Americanness of the expression: at the right end of the Movie Corpus screenshot, it shows that 145 of the examples came from a North American film. Only 4 came from British or Irish films.
Is it British yet?
The of has been coming to Britain, as Tibs noted. The table below shows how often big of a deal/difference occur per million words in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (collected in 2012–13) and the News on the Web corpus (2010-now). In the news corpus, the BrE rate is 4 times lower than the AmE rate for each expression. The news data has a lot fewer of these expressions, presumably because the corpus has more professionally composed and edited text.
| US 2010s web |
UK 2010s web |
US 2010+ news | UK 2010+ news |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| big of a deal | .78 | .14 | .36 | .09 |
| big of a difference | .06 | .03 | .04 | .01 |
The formatting of/around the ngrams is really annoying. My apologies!
ReplyDeleteIt's equally as irritating as "second of all".
ReplyDeleteWhy is it irritating? This type of phrase is pretty much arbitrary, and the "of" doesn't make it any more difficult to understand. And don't give me any nonsense about how it shouldn't be there because it's "unnecessary" as if the goal of language is to communicate every concept in the fewest number of syllables possible. And why is "second of all" irritating when "first of all" isn't?
ReplyDeleteDear Anon, have you never heard it used in a list? It goes something like this:
DeleteFirst of all, blah blah blah.
Second of all, blah blah blah.
Third of all, blah blah blah.
And so on. It's boring, bland and repetitive.
Now this may just be my own perception but something like this is far more elegant:
First of all, blah blah blah.
Secondly, blah, blah blah.
Lastly, blah blah blah.
Repetition is often a communication strategy.
DeleteThanks for this! I hadn't thought of recency illusion as a component - I know I suffered from that when "proactive" came back into common use. My _feeling_ is that I first noticed it in genre literature, so it might well have been USA-related texts, and only later spotted it on UK TV news.
ReplyDeleteI was a little surprised there was no mention of "off of", although I suppose it's a slightly different category - still, it's the first example I thought of when I saw the headline.
ReplyDeleteBut there is mention of it in the two links to other blog posts toward the end of the post!
Delete"too big of a hurry" here from 1902 https://www.thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=CC19020607-01.2.9&srpos=1&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22Big+of+a%22--------
ReplyDeleteAnd a bit further back, from 1883. https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=FDE18830920.2.5.1&srpos=1&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN-%22too+Big+of+a%22-------
DeleteLovely. Thank you!
DeleteThe 1883 one is from Fresno, California, and the 1902 one from Columbus, Ohio, so we still have no idea if "big of" originated in any particular region.
DeleteFor the first half of the 20th century, the only hits in Google Books for "big of a" are in transcripts of spoken testimony, in court or to Congressional committees. That's unfiltered speech, and it shows that even high-status speakers in formal settings said it sometimes. The earliest one I found was dated 1919, in an interview put on record for a Subcommittee on War Expenditures: "Q. How big of a fire was this fire on the right-hand side of the road?"
Arnold Zwicky has discussed the general construction in several posts:
ReplyDeletehttps://arnoldzwicky.org/2010/12/02/of-edm-in-the-comics/
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/of-edm-on-the-march/
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/ben-cohen/ (mentions incipient BrE usage)
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/innovative-edm/
See also Mark Liberman's Language Log post:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4153
I'm on the cusp! I grew up in the US in the 1970s in a very standard-English environment, and "how big a deal" is the one that's native to me, or at least it was — these days sometimes I hear myself saying "how big of a deal". But I had no idea that examples could be found that far back.
ReplyDeleteThere's an earlier linguistic study in Google Books: in Essays in Honor of Charles F. Hockett (1983), there's a chapter called "Non-Constituent Connectives" by Edward L. Blansitt, Jr., and in section 2, "English of as an Adjective + a(n) connective", Blansitt writes: "Many speakers of American English, however, would never say too big a tree but rather too big of a tree". He says he uses it himself in speech, although he can omit it in "when I am using an artificial formal English as a second dialect"; also, interestingly, he thinks the of can't appear with colors (*how green of a pasture), and is doubtful with long adjectives (?too important of a book).
There's also an entry on of a in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994), which concludes that it's a spoken idiom and not recommended for writing.
Fantastic!
DeleteAnd an even earlier mention in a linguistics journal: Constraints on Movement Transformations by Arthur Schwartz, Journal of Linguistics (1972), says: "However, in colloquial English there occurs a construction like too big of a chair to sit in ; too tough of an exam for anyone to pass ; etc."
Delete