prepositions

one sign of the profound decline of our society - and of course the most important one - is that people just continually use the wrong prepositions. i don't remember this as a pervasive problem up until the last few years, and i'm not sure how to explain it. i see it on student papers, more or less in every sentence. but you see/hear it all the time in the msm too.

but: try teaching it; there are no general principles, just common sense, sensitivity to context, and relentless literacy. so i'm gonna start pillorying mistakes here, i guess. "egypt says israel apology of troop deaths is insufficient" (cnn screen scroll). 'for,' not 'of,' surely. if that's one too many characters for your scroll, 'on' is ok.

the first thing you cnn interns should do is start trying it in somewhat different constructions. 'i would like to apologize to you of that," e.g. but maybe that sounds right to a cnn intern too. basically, these are esl-type problems; perhaps we are raising a generation of white korean-americans. on the other hand, to apply a test like this, you'd have to suspect that you might have it wrong, which you can't if you've got no frigging idea, and no frigging idea that you've got no frigging idea, due to pathological self-esteem.