Monday, September 1, 2014

"Embarrassed of"

To my ears, the normal preposition after "embarrassed"  is by, but I have increasingly hearing embarrassed of.

A few other language writers have noticed the same thing:
English language and usage
Grammarphobia

I was interested to see what Google N-gram shows.  I have multiplied the frequency of embarrassed of by 100 to make the line more visible.  It is still very infrequent compared to embarrassed by, but its frequency is indeed increasing:

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