Why has this redundant ‘of’ crept into Australian English lately? Is it another cretinous Americanism? I hear it too often & it really grates.
As in ‘he is too good of a coach to remain outside coaching’.
It’s ‘he is too good a coach to remain outside coaching’ FFS.
Hmmmmm.
I was prepared to shitcan the Yanks for saying “off of” (eg he climbed off of the roof) until I remembered that my favourite band The Rolling Stones (new album out tomorrow!!!) had a big hit with “Get Off Of My Cloud”.
One that’s annoying me lately is ‘often times’.
There is no situation where ‘times’ adds any extra information.
Noonan probably required here as the SME on old school grammar type shiiiii, but I am guessing that the missing “of” we are talking about could also be a contraction of a full expression which also makes no sense?
take for example:
I agree, this is how I would say or write this. However… Why? it doesn’t make any more sense than:
Is it possible that “too good of” is a contraction of something like “too good an example of”?
“He is too good an example of a coach”…
It doesn’t solve the problem expressed by @Gnik, in fact it just moves it…
English.
huh.
Nah..got me. Some English rules are based on forerunners of the language that just don’t apply with English.
One example being the rule on splitting infinitives. You are able to do it in English because an infinitive has at least two words, but not in Germanic or Romance languages.
I’ve never really understood these.
I may need to thoroughly research to help me understand better.
I’ll book some time immediately.
“Many a time and oft…” - W. Shakespeare.
Ignorance. Nothing else.
No it’s just plain ignorance come to Australia from the good old USA. It never used to be heard or written. People would say that Essendon are too poor a team to win another game for the season, or that Donald Trump is too astute a politician to get caught up in a Middle Eastern war. But then some ignorant oaf on US TV talks about it being too hot of a day to go outside, and some equally ignorant Australian oaf hears that and thinks it’s cool, and the next thing you know is that every other ignorant oaf has picked it up. And then idiot lexicographers and grammarians will notice and say, Ooh, cool, the language is evolving, when what they should be doing is making a note of it and putting “illit.” next to it.
I don’t disagree that The US is to language as Ivan Milat is to backpackers, but that wasn’t really my point in this instance.
The grammar police says you’re supposed to never do it, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid….ditto using a preposition to end a sentence with, but so many English verbs have prepositions as part of the meaning of the verb eg to put up with.
I can up with put those instances.
Sense, they make.
Wait… Were these rules formulated by Yoda?
May be apocryphal, but Winnie Churchill is supposed to have said:
“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which i will not put.”
Just to show how silly of* a rule it was.
(* For @Shelton10 !)
Here’s another one: I ignore the ‘rule’ about never starting a sentence with ‘and’.
And I agree with that.
Do you mean you don’t know what they are, or why they are? To boldly go is a split infinitive, because “boldly” jumps between the “to” and the verb. It breaches the rule for not splitting infinitive verbs like “to love” or “to jump”. The rule doesn’t need a reason.
To boldly go is just horrible, and to go boldly comes off the tongue just as easily.
But there are situations where splitting an infinitive seems much more natural than any other wording – I can’t think of an example at the moment but they do come up. I still never do it though. Usually the word that splits the infinitive is an adverb (eg boldly), so adopting Elmore Leonard’s rule and never using adverbs can often be a good solution. I mean, is “To boldly go where no man has been before” really any better than “To go where no man has been before”? I don’t think so.
Poetically, I think it’s better.
That hard consonant of go that sets up the second half of the sentence, that’s mirrored at the right time by gone.
Go boldly doesn’t sound as strong or as stirring.
You could leave out boldly, I guess, and depending on your emphasis you could make it work as well. I suppose man would have a stronger emphasis in that case.
Huh. TIL.
William Shatner’s iconic Star Trek monologue was produced with surprisingly little effort at the last minute. Gene Roddenberry wrote the final draft literally minutes before recording. Shatner was then hurriedly called to the dubbing stage and completed the legendary performance in just two takes.
It really is very good for so little prep. There’s a music to it. The pauses after the first two lines.