Giving ‘of’ the shove

JUNE CASAGRANDE

Dear June:

Is “a lot” one word or two?

Fictional Reader

of Your Dreams

P.S. You’re a genius.

Those are the letters I wish I got. Here are the letters I really

get.

Dear June:

In the Mailbag column of the April 27 Glendale News-Press, there’s

a letter to the editor concerning “Bat Boy, the Musical” that’s being

staged in one of our local high schools. The headline over the letter

reads: “Parents making ‘Bat Boy’ too big of a deal.” It’s my

judgment, as a retired newspaperman, that the use of the preposition

“of” in this instance is not only superfluous, it’s incorrect. Yet I

frequently hear it used by journalists and others on television. What

say you?

Bill Loughlin

Bill is one of two people who wrote this week about the “of” in

that headline. That would be a great thing for a columnist who

actually knew the answer, but I don’t.

Well, I do and I don’t. I know that a preposition doesn’t seem to

have a place between an adjective and a noun, “big” and “deal,”

respectively. But I don’t know how to explain the grammatical

construction of the whole, bizarre phrase “too big a deal,” “too

expensive a car,” “too brilliant a colum- nist,” etc.

So I looked it up.

First, the good news: I actually found references in two of my

language books. Now the bad news: Neither of them mentioned using

“of.”

“Garner’s Modern American Usage” actually has a listing for, “Too

+adj a +n.” That is, “too” plus an adjective plus “a” plus a noun.

“This idiom being perfectly acceptable,” author Bryan Garner

writes, “there’s no reason to insist on the artificiality of ‘a too

+adj. +noun.’ That is, ‘too good a job’ is better than ‘a too good

job.’ E.g.: ‘But Monica is too nice a person for that kind of

behavior.’”

Garner has helped us understand that this construction is an

idiom. But it seems strange to me that he thinks we’re likely to be

confused about whether to say, “a too nice person” while he doesn’t

address whether an “of” should go in there. I’ve heard lots of people

make the “of” mistake but I never hear anyone say, “a too nice

person.”

The “Oxford English Grammar,” a scary book if ever there was one,

is about as helpful.

“The intensifiers ‘so,’ ‘that,’ and ‘too’ followed by an adjective

can come at the beginning of a noun phrase:

‘Certainly it was so prominent a punctuation in the landscape that

one was positively drawn towards it.’

‘I’d had a reasonable lunch but not that good a lunch.’

‘I think you’re putting that in too simplistic a form.’”

So, the answer to our question about the difference between “too

big a deal” and “too big of a deal” is that two grammar authorities

say the former is an acceptable construction. Their silence on the

latter suggests what our instinct tells us: that there’s no reason to

squeeze a preposition into this approved idiom.

No doubt, the same people who caught “of” in the Glendale

News-Press headline are fuming over the word “towards” in the Oxford

example. I should point out that Oxford uses examples its authors

find in newspapers and books, and they leave in the original authors’

little errors. They also address both American and British English.

And though, in America, the usual choice is “toward,” the British

prefer “towards.”

I already knew that. Just as I knew that “a lot” is two words and

that I am, therefore, a genius.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].