In which your humble narrator decries creeping colloquialism.
One of the odder, at least to my ear, verbal tics endemic to the laconic, Scandinavian or German inhabitants of this God-forsaken windswept tundra is the change of the idiomatic construction "based on" to the bastardized alternate, "based off of". This variation doesn't seem as jarring when spoken as it does when written, but it still frosts my grammarian posterior.
In assignments for my class, students are constantly declaiming that an idea or practice is "based off of" some pertinent theory. This makes no sense from a metaphorical perspective. A house can successfully be "based on" a foundation, but it cannot be "based off of" the foundation and retain its function.
In conclusion, get it right, people, or pay the price.
I love this.
ReplyDeleteI just find it frustrating when people adapt idioms in ways that make no sense what so ever.
ReplyDelete"I could care less" being another example.
So I'm a bit guilty of mistakenly using that one, Bob has hammered it out of me for the most part but I used to say "I could care less" a lot, oy, bad Danielle. Thanks for adding a link to my blog on your reading list.
ReplyDelete