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?

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. 

And how is the old version doing?

Other SbaCL posts about of

References

I get various Google Alerts for things related to my interests, and today I got one for a story in The Sun and the Daily Express about the '20 English words the public wants to revive'.

Now, if I want to read these articles, I have to pay or give them my first-born, or something like that, so I'm not rushing to read them. But I've got enough of a gist from the Google Alert (orig. AmE) blurb:

The 2025 Separated by a Common Language UK-to-US Word of the Year is:

Here's an English teacher explaining the word

     Interesting slate of UK to US candidates, especially “soccer.” Didn’t realize about shrinkflation. Fiddly definitely.

Later new derivatives tend in a large measure to be colloquial, undignified, or trivial,as bumpy, dumpy, flighty, hammy, liney, loopy, lumpy,  ungy, messy, oniony, treey, verminy, vipery; some are from verbs, as dangly. 

Fiddly only came into being in the early 20th century, the period of "colloquial, undignified, or trivial" -y adjectives. And indeed the OED marks fiddly as "colloquial". 

I'll be happy to have it in AmE, as it is undeniably useful. The Collins thesaurus offers some synonyms:

     pernickety (=AmE persnickety), tricky, detailed, fine, exacting 

I think tricky would work best for some of the things I call fiddly, but tricky seems to connote a challenge, rather than a hassle. Fiddly is all hassle, dexterity, and attention to detail.

Congratulations, fiddly. You've made it. 

A shorter (maybe), quicker and earlier post this month, since I am going to be travel(l)ing without much internet access in September and am (orig. AmE) freaking out* about how much work I have to do before the autumn/fall semester begins. 

In a recent Language Log post, Victor Mair points out a difference in how American and British teens might react to this shirt:

Americans would tend to say I wouldn't be caught dead in it but BrE speakers would more likely say I wouldn't be seen dead in it.

To me, these bring up different images, since caught is a more dynamic verb than seen. Those who are caught are generally trying not to be caught. I wore the t-shirt, but I wanted to avoid being seen in it. But those who are seen can't help being seen. If you say 'I wouldn't be seen dead in it', it sounds to me like you fear someone putting the t-shirt on you after you've died. But maybe that difference in imagery is just me. Most people aren't so literalist about their idioms.

Anyhow...what's the history of these phrases? The OED has American caught dead from 1870 and American seen dead in 1887, then a Scottish-authored found dead in 1923, followed by British seen deads in the 1930s. So it's likely it started in the US, but then got translated a bit in UK.

from the OED

As well as caught unaware, there's the more frequent caught unawares (which might not have been tagged as an adjective in the corpus, leading to its absence from the chart above). Another AmE caught expression is caught short: 

from the OED

So, generally, caught is used with adjectives to describe being in a situation you're not prepared for. With a noun, we also have caught by surprise (more than 2x more US hits in GloWbE). 

But not all caught + adjective phrases with connotations of unreadiness are more American. Caught red-handed has more UK hits in the GloWbE corpus (less than 2x more), and that makes sense since red-handed is from Scotland in the early 1800s. (The red is the blood of the person you've just murdered.) That's a more literal caught, though—being caught by the police (or someone).

*I've only really just appreciated that anything that looks bold when I'm in the blogger editor doesn't look bold when the post is published—at least not on my browser. So, I'm going to start putting bold things in another colo(u)r just to underscore the difference. If anyone wants to give me a tip on how to retroactively change the font across the blog to make the bolds stand out more, please let me know via gmail (lynneguist). 

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context: