Showing posts with label Google N-gram. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google N-gram. Show all posts

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:

Friday, August 29, 2014

"Louche" revisited

Here is a link to an old column that I wrote in 1999 about the word louche.  This word now means something like 'shady, disreputable', though its definition in the OED is 'oblique, not straightforward.'

At the time, I only had my intuitions that the frequency of the word was increasing, but Google N-gram has made it easy to check this kind of thing.  Here is the Google N-gram chart: