Random thoughts on assist in or assist with?

A questioner at the language forum 'Pain in the English' asked, which is correct?

• Assists attorney in drafting documentation.
• Assists attorney with drafting documentation.

The few people that commented seemed to agree that the first was correct, and there was one suggestion that 'assist in' is followed by a verb, whereas 'assist with' is followed by a noun.

Both in and with are prepositions, so the only verb form that can follow either of them is a gerund, which is in fact a verbal noun, and there doesn't seem to be any grammatical reason that I can think of why a gerund can't follow 'assist with', nor any reason why a standard noun can't follow 'assist in'. But perhaps there's an idiomatic one.

Random thoughts on 'Kiss me quick'

Preparing a possible post on flat adverbs (adverbs that take the same form as their adjective equivalents) I started wondering about the origins of the expression 'Kiss me quick'.

In Britain, 'Kiss me quick' is perhaps best known from being printed on hats traditionally worn at seaside resorts such as Blackpool, but the origins seem likely to be American.

Clicking on the clippings will take you to the original at Google Books.

Random thoughts on 'Early Doors'

Seeing the World Cup has just started, it seems a good time to look at an expression whose popularity largely stems from its use by those who write and talk about football - 'early doors'. Here are some examples taken from the online version of football magazine Four Four Two:

We got a good goal early doors, and I thought we were going to stop them scoring, we defended very well.

a side that seems to revel in giving away cheap goals early doors

former Sevilla keeper, Javi Varas, was brought in early doors to give experience in goal.

but those odds went up and up when the team dispensed of Valladolid early doors in what was an eventual 4-2 victory.

At The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms they define 'early doors' as meaning 'early on, especially in a game or contest'. That many of those who don't follow football have been blissfully unaware of this expression (at least until recently) is exemplified in a remark in an article in the political weekly magazine Tribune, from 2002:

He is also fond of the expression "early doors" although, as no one knows what that means, it is not clear if it is relevant.

Tribune, Vol 66 - 2002

So how did this expression originate? Taking my leads from an article by Michael Quinnion at World Wide Words, I decided to see what I could dig up, mainly at Google Books.

Random thoughts on the expression go missing

• Have you seen the bread knife? It seems to have gone missing.

When we say that something or somebody went or has gone missing, we mean that it or that person (has) disappeared: the thing or person are not where we expect to find them. It is sometimes considered informal, but is often used in the British media to refer to people who have disappeared, especially in time of war and natural disasters etc.

In the past this use was mainly British, but it seems to be being increasingly used in the American media, and not all Americans are happy about it. In fact so many wrote and complained to GrammarGirl about it, that she nominated it her Peeve of the Year for 2007.

Even the BBC are in two minds about it, apparently. Writing in the New York Times in 2004, the late William Safire quoted from their style guide:

Go missing is inelegant and unpopular with many people, but its use is widespread. There are no easy synonyms. Disappear and vanish do not convince, and they suggest dematerialization, which is rare.

But there doesn't seem to be anything about it in the Guardian or The Economist style guides, nor in the standard usage books.

I decided to have a bit of a closer look.

Random thoughts on task as a verb

A reader wrote to the Grammarphobia blog about a line spoken by George Clooney in the film The Monuments Men:

We have been tasked to find and protect art that the Nazis have stolen.

The reader suggested that this was anachronistic, as the use of task as a verb is fairly recent. Other people complain about task being used as a verb at all. But Grammarphobia pointed out that the use of task as a verb is in fact very old.

Random thoughts on all in all

All in all

In an article from the Economist about an important new discovery in cosmology there appeared the following sentence:

All in all, then, a big day for cosmology—assuming the results hold up.

I got to wondering about the origins of the expression 'all in all', and decided to have a poke round Google Books.

Random thoughts on tidbits and titbits

tidbit   &   titbit

An aquaintance of mine was wondering why Americans say tidbit while in Britain we usually say titbit, with the implied question 'Why do the Americans have to change everything?'

Indeed there are some people, and not only in Britain, who think that tidbit is a bowdlerisation of titbit, the story being that Americans thought that tit was rude, and so replaced it with tid. This idea was recently repeated by David Mitchell at the Guardian, but it is, of course, nonsense.

Random thoughts on had rather, profusely illustrated with extracts from literature

Somebody wrote to WordReference forums with a 'question taken from an exam', where you have to fill the gap with one of the options given:

"She ____they travelled by bus."

1. would sooner
2. had rather
3. had sooner

I don't know whether it said 'Choose the best option' or 'Choose the correct option', but either way, the answer they gave was 1. - would sooner. But what I'm interested in is whether both the other answers are 'wrong'.

The origins of all of a sudden

A thread at the language forum Pain in the English discusses the expression all of a sudden and two apparent variants:

• all of the sudden
• all the sudden

As this Ngram graph shows, all of a sudden has long been the standard version, but apparently the second version is used to a certain extent in North America, and somebody suggested that the third is used in the North of England (although I can find no evidence of that).

Ngram Viewer

This doesn't seem to be a particularly big issue, as neither Burchfield's third edition of Fowler, or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage have anything to say about it. It's enough of an issue, though, for Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern American Usage, to write:

all of a sudden. This is the phrase, not *all of the sudden—e.g.: “I wasn't thinking of anything, but all of the sudden [read all of a sudden] I was no longer tired.” Sam Brumbaugh, Goodbye, Goodness: A Novel 108 (2005).

LANGUAGE-CHANGE INDEX
*all of the sudden for all of a sudden: Stage 1

But that little seventeenth-century bump for all of the sudden, plus the discovery that all on a sudden gave all of a sudden quite a run for its money in the first half of the eighteenth century, made me interested to find out more about how this idiom began. And have some fun with the Google Books clip function at the same time.

To separate or not? (1) - get something across

I was recently doing some material in class on phrasal verbs. We were using a CAE course book, which told the students they needed to know whether a phrasal verb is transitive or intransitive (does it take an object or not). And if it's transitive, they should know whether it's separable or inseparable.

Personally I'm not so convinced students need to know the grammatical properties of each phrasal verb so much as seeing them in context and getting practice in using them. But that's another story.

On the other hand ...

You are all no doubt aware of the double linking device - On the one hand ... on the other (hand) ... used to contrast two ideas, for example:

On the one hand we could try that new restaurant on Park Street. On the other, we could just stay at home and order a pizza.

But can we use just on the other hand without the introductory On the one hand? Can we say:

We could try that new restaurant on Park Street. On the other hand we could just stay at home and order a pizza.

I asked some of my students this question the other day. How do you think they answered? How would you answer?

Expressions with All but, none but, but for etc

You might occasionally come across sentences like these:

• The party was all but over when we arrived.
• All but one of the plates were damaged

The expression all but has a couple of different uses, and from what I've seen on language forums, this can give even native speakers some problems, so in this post we'll look at this plus a couple of other expressions with but.