Showing posts with label prepositions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prepositions. Show all posts

how big (of) a problem?

May 18, 2026

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?

Linguist Harold Allen gave the change a tongue-in-cheek name: the Big of Syndrome. The adjective involved need not be big, of course. (Still, I'll use big of a lot here, because that makes it easy to find examples.)

Let's look at the elements of a big-of expression:
  • 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]. 
That gives us the possibility of phrases like these (from the Corpus of Contemporary American English):
  1. cacao provides habitat that is of as high of a quality as their natural forests (wisc.edu)
  2. Seems like I took too long of a break.(ER [tv])
  3.  no matter how great their sacrifice or how big of heroes they might be (comment on a CNN blog)
  4. I asked him about how big of threat is ISIS to America's national security (CBS Face the Nation)
Notice in example 3 we have both the traditional structure—how+ADJ+NOUN PHRASE (in blue)—and the new structure how+ADJ+of+NOUN PHRASE. Even if you have the big-of syndrome, you don't add of if the adjective precedes a definite noun phrase like the heroes or their sacrifice. And example 4—it's just a bit too weird, but we'll come back to that. 

Why did people start saying it?

There are two reasons that big a deal might become big of a deal. One is that both of and a reduce to [É™] ('uh') in informal or fast speech. So, people hearing big É™ deal might internali{s/z}e and learn it as big a deal or big of deal. I think that might be what's going on with example 4 —it might be that the transcript of the television program[me] has mistaken a threat for of threat and it's not really an example of big of + non-count noun.

But big of a deal has both of and a; we'd probably expect there to be two syllables even in fast speech. So I'm not convinced that the 'reduced pronunciation' explanation can explain the whole situation. I think we need the second reason. 

The second reason is that this seems to be a case of analogical change. To quote Lyle Campbell: 

     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)

The pattern that big-of sayers are imitating is the pattern that English already uses for much, as in: 
      How much of a problem is that going to be? Too much of a problem.
No one says *How much a problem or *Too much a problem.

Why would anyone try to make how big a problem more like how much of a problem? Well, first, you can probably see the semantic similarity there: both are asking about the extent of the problem. So, they may be perceived as belonging to the same pattern.  (Interestingly, how much of a is fairly rare in the 19th century according to the Corpus of Historical American English. Too much of a is older. But I can't distract myself with that right now. I've already spent a whole day on this post.)

There's probably also some discomfort with the (standard) of-less version due to the fact that we don't usually have adjectives before noun phrases (big a problem). Adjectives usually go in noun phrases (a big problem). When noun phrases seem unconnected to other parts of an English sentence, of is often the glue that sticks the noun onto the sentence. Since of is the most semantically empty (meaningless) preposition, it makes no difference to the meaning of the phrase if we add it in.

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.

1932US/CAThe Death Kiss  If I'm any good of a guesser, he ought to be here by now. 
1939US/CAThe Little Princess  a cup of tea? - Oh no thank you. We're in too big of a hurry. Oh, I see. 
1942TV/MOVLure 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

And how is the old version doing?


Even though the of version is on the rise, the of-less version is still standard in print—in both countries.  


This might be too long (of) a post, but I hope it's got(ten) the job done!

Other SbaCL posts about of


References

Allen, Harold B. 1989. The Big of Syndrome. American Speech 64, 94–96. https://doi.org/10.2307/455116 
Campbell, Lyle. 2020. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press. 
Rapp, Linda L. 1991. The Big of Syndrome: An Update. American Speech 66, 213–20. doi:10.2307/455893.
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alongside

Mar 21, 2026

A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: "Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?"  I hadn't noticed it at that point, but once he'd mentioned it, I felt surrounded by alongside.

As this Google Books ngram shows, the word has taken off in the 21st century:

Separating out the British and American books, we can see that this is a British-led trend.
Alongside climbed in British usage throughout the 20th century. American English suddenly decided to (orig. AmE) play catch-up in the 21st century.

This trend is observable in other corpora too. The News on the Web corpus, for example, shows more than double the rate of alongside in British news sources versus American ones. 

table shows Approx 50 alongside per million words in US corpus, 120 per million word
alongside by country

And within the US News data, the rise of alongside has sped up since 2020. 

alongside on just American news sites

Among(st) the prepositions, alongside is a relative (orig. AmE) newbie. In the OED, where it's marked as "originally nautical," its first citation is from 1704; its definition: "In a position parallel to; side by side with; close to the side of; next to, beside." So the examples are about boats positioned next to other boats or docks, etc. It seems to have gradually moved onto land, especially in the UK, in the 19th century.

So why have Americans suddenly (orig. AmE) taken a shine to alongside? Why is it more attractive than along or beside or next to? Wondering whether there was a trend toward(s) longer, British prepositions, I tried comparing it to amongst. But the more-BrE amongst seems to have peaked in AmE about 12 years ago:

chart shows a decline in rate of use of amongst: from about 16 per million words in 2014 to about 8 per million words in 2026
amongst on American news websites

In 2013, the online magazine Slate published an article by Ben Yagoda about Americans saying amongst instead of among. Perhaps once people were talking about the "British invasion" of amongst, Americans became more self-conscious about it. If Ben published an article about alongside, could that change its fortunes?

Having had alongside pointed out to me, I'm now self-conscious about using it. But this blog gives us a record of me using it:
  • "BrE has kerb for the edging alongside a road" (curb/kerb, May 2020)
  • "British pigs in blankets are small sausages wrapped in bacon (and cooked!). They are delicious. They're traditionally served alongside turkey as part of Christmas dinner."  (pigs in blankets, Feb 2020)
  • "I've seen a lot of "down with grammar!" messages, often alongside 'learning should be fun!'" (grammar is not the enemy, May 2016)

So, what do you think: do I sound Britified when I say such things, or is alongside completely international now?

***

PS: Searching for commentary about alongside, I found some concern about the use of alongside with. Further (orig. BrE) rooting around in the corpora, though, show that alongside with is a tiny proportion of alongside usages (0.7 per million words in AmE, 0.8 per million words in BrE in the NOW corpus).  

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in (one's) stride, at (a) pace

Nov 11, 2024

This post is inspired by a poll that Ellen Jovin, aka the Grammar Table, ran in September. Before I get into that, let me point out that there is a Kickstarter to support the documentary about her spreading grammatical joy across all 50 US states. It'd be lovely to be able to see that film in a (BrE) cinema/(AmE) theater or event near you, near me and near everybody. So if you have the wherewithal to support it, click!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rebelwithaclause/rebel-with-a-clause
 
Now back to our (somewhat) regularly scheduled grammar-gazing. 

to take (something) in (one's) stride

Ellen asked on social media whether people say take it in stride or take it in one's stride: 



When I see a split like that, I think dialects.

The version with a possessive pronoun, to take in one's stride, is the more British (and non-North American) version:


And the shorter version, to take in stride, is the North American: 


The phrase is a metaphor from horse racing. As the OED defines it:

to take in one's stride: of a horse or its rider, to clear (an obstacle) without checking one's gallop; figurative to deal with (a matter) incidentally, without interrupting one's course of action, argument, etc. Also (chiefly U.S.) without possessive adjective.

It seems to come from the UK in the early-mid 1800s, and then takes off in its possessiveless form in 1930s US. (The possessive-ful lines are low in the following graph because I had to choose just one possessive form to search—I chose his for the illustration because it's the most frequent in this phrase in Google Books.)



It's not clear to me whether AmE speakers back then were familiar with the racing expression. If not, then the expression might not have been recogni{s/z}ed as metaphorical, and therefore might be more likely to change.

But then again, I'm not sure the possessive is absolutely needed—you wouldn't take something in someone else's stride. So maybe Americans dropped the possessive in both literal and metaphorical usage. A horsey person might have to tell us.

at (a) pace

At pace (meaning 'moving fast') is a similar expression—a prepositional phrase involving a noun that alludes to walking—and it has no possessive or other word introducing it. But that doesn't help us explain the American loss of the possessive in in stride, since at pace is a more British and much more recent expression. 


An older version has the indefinite determiner: at a pace. That's found in similar numbers in AmE and BrE. And then there's the very old (Middle English) expression apace, which means much the same thing and sounds much like at pace. It's possible that at pace is an eggcorn for apace, or that it's at a pace without the a, or maybe it's a bit of both—i.e. different people have come to the same form from different angles.

why?

So we have two phrases that originally had a determiner* (a possessive pronoun or an article) between a preposition and a noun for a stepping action, and in just one place (but not the same place) the expression has been getting shorter. Why? Well, the basic answer is: language changes and it doesn't ask anyone's permission. If it changes in one place it doesn't need to change in the other. And for set phrases like this, change is likely to be piecemeal. Just because one phrase loses its determiner, doesn't mean all such phrases will. 

Since these expressions have got(ten) more and more figurative over the ages (referring to properties like ease and speed, rather than literal steps or paths), the determiners have had less and less work to do. Since they are unstressed syllables, they're easy to swallow up. So, if they go, we might not miss them, and if they stay they probably won't bother us. C'est la parole. 


*You'll see above that OED calls these things possessive adjectives. I don't. They act more like determiners (e.g., a(n), the and this) than like adjectives like good or corporate.
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fit for purpose / fit to purpose

Aug 14, 2022

 So I tweeted this recently...


(click on it to get the whole picture from Twitter)

Here's another view of how much more fit for purpose is used in BrE, and how relatively recent it is:

(click to enlarge)

But then Stephen P wrote to point out this tweet by an American with fit to purpose:



In searching for that tweet on Twitter, I discovered other Americans writing fit to purpose. Their numbers are dwarfed by the number of BrE speakers saying fit for purpose, but it's an interesting development! 






The moral of this story: prepositions change easily. That's because prepositions don't have much meaning in themselves. 

This one doesn't seem to have shown up yet on Ben Yagoda's Not One-Off Britishisms, but then again, is it a Britishism in the US? Did Americans pick up fit for purpose and change the preposition, or did they pick up the rarer to and make it their own? There's the second moral of this story: calling something a "Britishism" or an "Americanism" is a complicated business. (And if you want to know how complicated, I have a book to sell you...)

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UK-to-US Word of the Year 2021: university

Jan 11, 2022

The annual preamble  (you can make that rhyme if you try hard enough)

Each year since 2006, this blog has designated Transatlantic Words of the Year (WotY). The twist is that I choose the most 'of the year' borrowings from US-to-UK and from UK-to-US. 

This year's WotY posts are a bit later than usual. Had I had strong ideas about which words to crown, I might have written the posts during my Christmas (BrE) holiday/(AmE) vacation, but I didn't, so I thought I'd wait till I was on the plane back home on New Year's Day. Except that I didn't get on a plane on New Year's Day, and the travel woes got more and more complicated after that. A few days' recovery was needed. So I'm taking the opportunity to announce my Words of the Year on the Zoom programme/show That Word Chat on 11 January, and this post will post at that time.

During the 2020 WotY season, I was very interested in the variability of the language for our universal experiences of the early pandemic. Isolation, lockdown, and quarantine were Words of the Year from different English-speaking nations, but generally referred to the same thing. (In the latest issue of the journal Dictionaries, which I am hono(u)red to edit, Wendalyn Nichols and Lewis Lawyer tell the tale of how the WotY process led Cambridge Dictionary to record new senses for quarantine.)  By the end of the year, there was hope of a vaccine, a word that ended up being or inspiring several dictionaries' 2021 Words of the Year. But BrE jab had already poked its head into the US in December 2020,  thanks to Oxford-Astra Zeneca's early vaccine successes, so it was my 2020 WotY. Since then the transatlantic vocabulary traffic has seemed rather calm. With all of us glued to our computers and our streaming services, you'd think that words would be happily travel(l)ing while we stayed (at) home. But no. It was really difficult to find clear candidates for the 2021 SbaCL WotYs. 

Eligibility criteria:

  • Good candidates for SbaCL WotY are expressions that have lived a good life on one side of the Atlantic but for some reason have made a splash on the other side of the Atlantic this year. 
  • Words coined this year are not really in the running. If they moved from one place to another that quickly, then it's hard to say that they're really "Americanisms" or "Britishisms". They're probably just "internetisms". The one situation in which I could see a newly minted word working as a transatlantic WotY would be if the word/expression referenced something very American/British but was nevertheless taken on in the other country.
  • When I say word of the year, I more technically mean lexical item of the year, which is to say, there can be spaces in nominations. Past space-ful WotYs have included gap year, Black Friday, and go missing.
And as we shall see this year, I'm even willing to go sublexical. So without further ado...

 

The UK-to-US Word of the Year: university (= AmE college)

Now, of course, the word university is general English and has been in use in the US for a very long time. (The University of Pennsylvania has been so called since 1779.) So rather than talking about the importation of a word, we're talking about AmE adopting a BrE sense/usage for a word form it had already. (We've certainly had WotYs like that before, including jab, ginger, and bump.)

What's changed is that US people are talking about their higher education place/experience as university more than they used to. Back in my day (I hope you read that with a suitably wavering voice), we always called it college, no matter whether the institution had college or university or institute or maybe something else in its name. And, of course, that's what Americans mostly still do.

But some Americans seem to be saying university in some of those contexts, particularly after the preposition in. The News on the Web (NOW) corpus has three US examples of in university for 2011 (from just two sources), but over 20 for 2021. The turning point seems to have been 2019, but 2021 showed us it wasn't going anywhere. Here's a poorly formatted sample (I'll try to fix it later): 

21-12-01 US

Houston Chronicle

  focused on earning money and started his journey during his academic years in university .

21-11-03 US

Human Rights Watch

  community support officer also showed him the process of enrolling in university

21-11-02 US

techcrunch.com

for-profit educational products aimed at students not yet in university .

21-10-18 US

Yahoo

  was founded by Neo Zhizhong and Alicia Cheong, who met while they were in university .

21-09-16 US

polygon.com

in-game inspiration combined with his background studying English literature in university .

21-08-29 US

syfy.com

. The tale centers around two former friends who knew each other in university .

21-07-30 US

Forbes

none of the knowledge I needed was taught in university .

21-07-14 US

newyorker.com

  West Berlin fell on November 9, 1989, when Erpenbeck was twenty-two and in university .

21-06-25 US

InfoQ

  guy now, I've learned more outside of university than I ever did in university .

21-06-13 US

VentureBeat

  , I'd heard the word " Hittite " before. I studied history in university .

21-05-25 US

soompi.com

  divorce, both of them travel back in time to when they first met in university .

21-04-30 US

Forbes

  get the whole preamble, I started in this sort of Blockchain space back in university .

21-03-28 US

East Tennessean

  and clubs are a great resource for people who are struggling with their faith in university .

21-03-20 US

Yahoo

  And so I was encouraged to cook more. I cooked for my friends in university .

 

But in BrE, it would be at university in most of those contexts:

GloWbE corpus GB section: At university 707, in university 55


Rather than borrowing the BrE expression at university, AmE is using that BrE sense of university in the same prepositional contexts as AmE uses college:

In GloWbE corpus US, 'in college' outnumbers 'at college' 1195:113.
One does find some relevant examples of at university in AmE, but there something interesting is happening. Note the capitali{s/z}ation in this tweet:


 

Forbes magazine has a couple of 2020 uses, both by non-Americans about non-American subjects—but what's interesting is the American-seeming capitalization—probably not how the BrE/AusE-speaker authors would have written it.  

Her father also passed away from testicular cancer during her second year at University
There seems to have been some sense in 2020 that University was in some way an abbreviated name or title of the place. I was trained in AmE to capitali{s/z}e the 'u' when referring to a particular institution as an institution, but in those cases (in AmE) it was always preceded by the. For example, my employment contract would be between me and the University. But in the more BrE-like usage, it's not preceded by a the and so Americans don't quite know what to do with it. In AmE, you would study at the University of Pennsylvania, but when you do so you're in college. We're not quite ready for at university, even though we're happy with at school.

[See this old post for discussion of the different meanings/uses of school, college and university in the two countries, which will cover at least half of the things that you might be itching to mention right now.]

As well as familiarity with BrE university, I wonder if part of the motivation for this change-in-progress is a new division of labo(u)r between community colleges and universities. When I went (BrE-from-AusE) to uni, it was usual to apply to a four-year college/university and go for four years (or so). But changes to the costs of higher education have led many Americans to take their first year or two at a community college (see that old post again) and transferring their credits to a bachelor-degree-granting institution after taking their (AmE) general education courses at a cheaper, more local place. Maybe the distinction between a place where you get some tertiary-level credits and where you can get a bachelor's degree seems more relevant now. This is just supposition, but it could be investigated...

This WotY was inspired by Ben Yagoda's posts on his Not One-Off Britishisms blog and his tweets on the topic. As well as noticing preposition+university, he's also been tracking university students, as a synonym for college students in AmE.  I don't want to repeat all his good work, so please see his posts on related topics here. When I asked him yesterday what he'd pick if this were his WotY decision, he chose university. Luckily, I'd already started writing this post! 


Thanks to Ben for all his great, year-round Britishism-in-America tracking, to Mark Allen at That Word Chat for letting me announce my WotYs at his (orig. AmE) shindig, and thank you for reading!  To read part 2 (UK>US) click here.


 

 

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AmE = American English
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OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)