My children think I’m so quaint and old-fashioned in my dislike of some modern English usage, although I have to say in my defence that I do use new words, and I am especially carefully with spoken language in my writing to get it as current as possible – without being silly about it!
I love different regional accents and ways of speaking, but I am sorry.. I am just very intolerant of incorrect ways of speaking. Along with ‘different to’ (as opposed to ‘different from’), ‘bored of’, to my ears is just not the correct form, ‘bored with’ or ‘bored by’ is surely right.
Yesterday I heard an educated person say that someone was ‘hand-shaked’ meaning that he was given a pay off by his firm when he left – a contraction, I guess, of ‘he was given a golden hand-shake’. This intrigued me because I know there has become a great flexibility between verbs and nouns, they each are being changed to be used in a different way. Now, strangely enough, I think this is quite inventive… the man on the radio yesterday couldn’t have said the person was ‘hand-shook’, but I actually can’t tell you why he couldn’t have said it!
People today often seem to criticise English teaching in schools because ‘they don’t teach grammar’; well, I went to school a very long time ago, I did English for my degree and my masters, and I have never been taught English grammar – my knowledge of grammar has been picked up from studying other languages.
So… going back to ‘bored of’, my attention was drawn to it being used on the BBC website; so I decided to check and see which is technically correct. Apparently, ‘bored with’ and ‘bored by’, are the standard ways of speaking and ‘bored of’ is a modern usage; perhaps it is a logical development of English, formed on the same pattern as ‘tired of’ or ‘weary of’. However it is still more correct not to use it… and I think it will continue to irritate me… even though it is just a natural change in the use of language!
Here is a link to the story which triggered these thoughts:
Bored of the king? – Does it matter where Richard III is buried? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-26526790
Lois Elsden 