| 词组 | of a |
| 释义 | of a On 2 April 1984 former shortstop Pee Wee Reese was asked (in front of a television camera) about the speech he would make when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. "It won't be that long of a speech," said Pee Wee. Another former shortstop, Tony Kubek, on a nationally televised baseball broadcast (15 August 1987), remarked that some idea or other was "too radical of a theory." What have we here? Shortstop idiom? Not exactly. Golfers use it too: • ... wouldn't be that difficult of a shot —Lee Tre-vino, golf telecast, 16 Nov. 1985 And newscasters use it: • How big of a carrier task force? —Jim Lehrer, television newscast, 24 Mar. 1986 And hosts of television cooking shows: • You can't get in here and make that big of a mess, can you? —Jeff Smith, "The Frugal Gourmet" (telecast), 14 Mar. 1987 And mayors: • I don't want to be considered too good of a loser — Edward Koch, quoted in N.Y. Times, 4 Oct. 1982 Even newspaper columnists will use it: • I don't care how good of a shape the economists say we're in —Erma Bombeck, Springfield (Mass.) Union, 16 Sept. 1976 What we have here is a fairly recent American idiom that has nearly a fixed form: that or how or too, or sometimes as, followed by an adjective, then of a and a noun. (In the rare instances where a plural noun is used, a is omitted.) Our evidence shows the idiom to be almost entirely oral; it is rare in print except in reported speech. The earliest examples we have seen so far are in the American Dialect Dictionary and date back to 1942 and 1943. It is undoubtedly at least somewhat older. This current idiom is just one of a group of idioms that are characterized by the presence of of a as the link between a noun and some sort of preceding qualifier. Perhaps the oldest of these is the kind of a or sort of a construction, which is used by Shakespeare and is even older than that. It has been aspersed by usage commentators since 1779 (see kind of a, sort of a). • The newspaperman has the same kind of a job as the housewife, eat it and forget it, read it and forget it — Flannery O'Connor, letter, 16 Feb. 1963 Nouns other than kind and sort are also found in this construction: • There's some class of a leak above —Myles na gCopaleen (Flann O'Brien), The Best of Myles, 1968 Similar to these is the giant of a man idiom, which has not been aspersed, as far as we know. Like the kind of a idiom, it has a noun as its head: • ... thanks to their idiot of a King's being Catholic —Henry Adams, letter, 22 Apr. 1859 Francis Lee Pratt, a writer of New England dialect stories in the late 19th century, used another similar idiom in which first-rate does the work of a noun. It was presumably current in New England at that time, because she used it several times. • ... and Captain Ben makes a first-rate of a husband —"Captain Ben's Choice," in Mark Twain's Library of Humor, 1888 When enough, more, or much is used in place of the noun, the idiom is scarcely noticeable: • The show made enough of a hit for us to have to give a command performance —Alexander Woollcott, letter, 4 Dec. 1917 • Instead, she's more of a mid-sized, no-nonsense cruiser —John Owens, Boating, January 1984 • This is too much of a temptation to the editor — Ring Lardner, preface, How to Write Short Stories, 1924 A possible forerunner of the current idiom is an older one in which the head is considerable. The Dictionary of American Regional English has examples going back as far as 1766 and shows two forms of the construction: considerable of a and a considerable of a. • A brick came through the window with a splintering crash, and gave me a considerable of a jolt in the back —Mark Twain, Sketches Old and New, 1875 (in DARE) The examples in our files have the first a omitted: • For a high toned agitator and Mayor of the Tombstone city water works it is considerable of a comedown — Tombstone Epitaph, ca. 1880, in Douglas D. Martin, Tombstone's Epitaph, 1951 • ... who at that time was considerable of a Socialist — The Autobiography of William Allen White, 1946 • ... that is considerable of an understatment —Rolfe Humphries, ed., introduction, New Poems by American Poets, 1953 ... The McGill News apparently caused considerable of a furore by printing a "top secret" picture of the famous fence —McGill News, Spring 1954 • ... and it was quite evident that he fancied himself considerable of a sheik —Octavus Roy Cohen, in Great Railroad Stories of the World, ed. Samuel Moskowitz, 1954 We conclude that all is not known about these idioms. Whether they are all structurally related in fact or simply seem to be from the sharing of of a is uncertain. Of those forms that are American (or North American)— the present idiom, the first-rate one, the considerable one—only the first-rate version appears to be geographically limited. The others seem to be widespread. The only sure thing is that when normative usage writers encounter these idioms their reaction is to condemn. Thus, we have had 200 years of condemnation of kind of a in spite of its literary use. MacCracken & Sandison 1917 condemned "rather of an athlete" and was dubious about "He isn't much of an athlete." And so it goes, right down to the current idiom: • ... Is "honesty" too strong of a word? —advt., N. Y. Times Mag., 10 Feb. 1980 Reader's Digest 1983 and Copperud 1980 condemn this as nonstandard and erroneous. But the only stricture on it suggested by our evidence is that it is a spoken idiom: you will not want to use it much in writing except of the personal kind. |
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