Grammar

[jsburbidge]

I have heard/seen (once heard, once seen) media writers/readers use the form "big of a" today -- once on the CBC's Metro Morning (Matt Galloway) and once in a Globe and Mail article.

When I was growing up this formation was not possible. Now I seem to run into it in supposedly non-slangy contexts all over the place. It grates really seriously.

The

Comments

[stoutfellow]

According to Arnold Zwicky, it's about twenty or thirty years old, and "spreading fast, especially among the young". It's one of a set of phenomena he calls "intrusive of", along with such expressions as "off of" and "outside of". Googling on "exceptional degree marking" gives a number of hits, mostly by Zwicky.

[castiron]

That age makes sense; it sounds correct (though definitely informal) to me, and I'm in the right age to have absorbed it if it's that old.

"How white of a piece of paper is it?" sounds wrong to me, but "How white of a paper is it?" sounds fine, and actually sounds better to me than "How white a paper is it?" -- the rhythm's better in the gramatically "incorrect" version.