Every now and then I’ll read a column on English grammar where the author or one of his readers is complaining about the unnecessary of in phrases like this:
too big of a job
The columnists that I’ve seen address this issue always stick very boringly to the tiny question of whether the of belongs or not. They never get into the questions I’d like to see discussed, so I guess I’ll have to do it myself.
First, I need to distinguish between two ways of using adjectives. When an adjective follows a form of be (or a few other verbs which I don’t want to talk about), it is known as a predicative adjective. For example:
Predicative adjectives
This movie is dull.
They were dead.
It’s going to be incredible.
When an adjective modifies a noun (usually appearing right before it), it is known as an attributive adjective. For example:
Attributive adjectives
We saw a dull movie.
Dead puppies aren’t much fun.
The incredible discovery made headlines.
The next relevant fact is that many adjectives take up more than a single word, as in the following predicative examples:
Multi-word predicative adjectives
He is jealous of everyone.
She is ready to get out of here.
These directions are really hard to follow.
This job is too big for one person to finish.
It’s generally more difficult to make attributive versions of adjectives like these. First of all, they usually can’t go before the noun anymore. For example, jealous of everyone and ready to get out of here become ungrammatical if you make them attributive and put them before the noun they modify, as seen below. Move them to after their nouns and they’re pretty much OK.
Multi-word attributive adjectives
*I know a jealous of everyone guy.
*Three ready to get out of here kids are waiting at the door.
Those are the easy cases. Other times, to make an attributive version of such an adjective, you have to wrap the adjective around the noun, like this:
These are really hard directions to follow.
And some predicative adjectives, like those beginning with too, get really weird when you make them attributive. You don’t put them right before the noun, or right after it; you do something like this:
This is too big a job for one person to finish.
You put one part not just before the noun (in this case job), but also before the determiner (in this case a).
What about the intruding of from the very first example? All I really have to say about that is: If you speak the “of a” dialect, you put an of between the too and the a. Well, that and a speculation that the of first came to be in those constructions by analogy with phrases such as too much of a good thing, or too many of our students. What I really wonder about is, why can’t you have attributive adjectives with too when the determiner is something other than a?
*too big the job (i.e. the job that’s too big)
*too big every job (i.e. every job that’s too big)
*too big no job (i.e. no job that’s too big)
And I also wonder what happens when you have a noun that doesn’t need a determiner at all, for example mass nouns such as water, or plural nouns. I did a search for “too * of”, and it looks like there are a few cases here and there of speakers who can do it, and put in of just as they might with a singular count noun like job:
- a2ps using too big of paper on dj500, and magicfilter eats text
link - Too Deep of Water
(This one is suspect, as it seems to have come from a native speaker of Spanish, so there may be some influence from how Spanish treats cases like these.)
link - Too small of rooms for the price!!
link - Checkout/processing with too long of titles
link - Too high of volumes for CORSIM
link
I couldn’t check for examples without the of , since a search for “too *” would have been just too broad. But I listen for them. If you hear someone say something like too deep water, too deep a water, too small rooms, or too small a rooms, I’d like to hear about it!
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