Grammar By Numbers

I love it when language wonks crunch numbers.

Last week I was describing to my sister a job offer. She replied, via IM: "It doesn’t seem like that painful of work for $50/hour." The sentence caught my ear, and I wondered whether it would be acceptable outside of casual conversation. My curiosity compelled me to email linguist Mark Liberman about it. He also found it interesting and wrote a post about it on Language Log.

Highlights:

Matt’s sister is blazing new linguistic trails here.

It’s not surprising that the sentence triggered enough of a WTF reaction in Matt to motivate him to ask about it.

Conclusion:

I’m happy to be able to tell Matt that I estimate his sister’s sentence to be 424.7 times less grammatically correct than "It doesn’t seem like that painful of a job for $50/hour" is.

Emily, don’t take this the wrong way. Everyone else, Emily is a great writer, and no I’m not a prick who enforces correct grammar in IM. I am merely a dork amused by anomalous usage wherever it pops up.

Yet I still feel like a cruel hidden camera TV show host preying on private behavior. "Surprise, Emily! You’ve been Language Logged!"