Comments on: Bored of life? What Dr. Johnson didn’t say

By: Malcolm Fereday

Malcolm Fereday — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:21:31 +0000

Bored “of” always jars when I hear it – and I’m pleased to have found this article reinforcing my preferred version. But, I do wonder about another option……..why not Bored “by”?

By: Michael Rundell

Michael Rundell — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:43:39 +0000

Re. SICK WITH: good question, Mike. I just checked our corpus and SICK OF is usually followed by words like “the sight of” or “hearing about”, while SICK WITH is followed either by an illness word (“sick with flu/dysentery” etc, or by a negative-emotion word like “worry”, “envy”, or “disappointment”. So the collocates point to different meanings of SICK, and this happens a lot (compare: heartily sick, dangerously sick, and violently sick. But the variation at BORED is less easy to explain.

By: Mike Ellwood

Mike Ellwood — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:23:42 +0000

I am glad that someone mentioned “fed up with”. To my ear, “fed up with” and “fed up of” carry equal weight, i.e. either sounds “correct” to me, whereas only “bored with” sounds correct (instead of “bored of”), although I admit there is little logic to this. (I am _well_ over 35, it has to be said).

By the way, don’t we have “sick with”? How about “sick with fear”?

By: Diane Nicholls

Diane Nicholls — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:10:21 +0000

Very interesting. I wonder to what extent ‘of’’s gain over ‘with’ in the context of ‘bored’ is the result of the more or less (let’s not go there!) synonymity between ‘bored’ and ‘tired’ that presumably led to the misquoting of Dr Johnson mentioned by Michael at the start. Do speakers, when replacing one word with a synonym also carry over its grammar patterns and common collocates? After all, we have ‘tired of’, ’sick of’, ‘weary of’ – ‘bored of’ seems like an obvious construction.

We don’t see ‘tired/sick/weary with’, so it’s not a two-way street. Is ‘bored’ losing its ‘with’ and having an ‘of’ forced on it because ‘bored’ is the exception in this ’synonym set’ and must therefore be made to conform?

Wish I had time to check what’s happening with ‘fed up with’ – is it losing its ‘of’ too?

By: Michael Rundell

Michael Rundell — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:56:31 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Sarolta – I had no idea about the steady decline of “of”, and can’t even guess what could be behind this (it is after all the 2nd most frequent English word in most corpora). Thanks also for the reminder about the U.S. corpus – for those who don’t know, this excellent (free) resource is available at http://www.americancorpus.org/. It’s a pretty large corpus (385 million words) of American English, and texts are classified by genre (five main categories) and by date of publication (1990-2008) – allowing the user to research the kinds of question that Sarolta describes here. I should of thought of that!

By: Sarolta

Sarolta — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:49:38 +0000

This is most interesting, Michael. The Corpus of American English confirms your observation that bored of is used more and more often. It's most frequent in fiction and spoken language and much less so in magazines and newspapers. However, diachronic studies show that the overall frequency of the preposition of has been decreasing over the 20th century. Obviously the downward trend does not show in all the word combinations that of is part of.

By: Stephen Bullon

Stephen Bullon — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:14:13 +0000

Michael’s post about bored of reflects a change in the language that we can see and measure over a relatively short space of time. This is a genuine change of prepositional choice, but the preposition of has also been noticeable in a grammatically dubious context, replacing the auxiliary have – You should of heard what he said last night!

One obvious reason for this is that in speech, “should have” and “should of” sound exactly the same, with the vowel being an unstressed schwa. In normal speech, it’s impossible to detect whether the speaker is saying have or of. But occasionally you hear people stressing the vowel, and they’re clearly saying of.

It’s relatively rare to see it in written English – the BNC has only a handful of citations in the written components as opposed to the spoken components, suggesting that it’s a recent phenomenon. But I came across an instance the other day in a book published nearly 30 years ago, The Rubicon File by A.J. Elder (Architectural Press 1980), in which the narrator opines at one point:

I fear we may not of heard the last of that.

And rather like that narrator, I fear we may not of heard the last of bored of.