Penny,
No, “in result of” is not exactly an American idiom. But Humbert’s English is European. Humbert grew up on the Riviera. His father was a Swiss citizen, “a salad of racial genes,” of mixed French and Austrian descent. Humbert’s mother was English.
Although “in result of” is not exactly an American idiom, American English is so full of regional, ethnic, rural and urban idioms that these matters are never clear cut and rarely final. Something I would call Corporate English is now also a factor. Corporate English occurs when people who are smart about business management but not smart about grammar gradually begin to twist the language with an on-going eruption of memos written in comically bad English, of no recognizable idiom other than the idiom of madness and machines, that is considered perfectly wonderful English by the underlings and henchpersons (a coinage of my own to satisfy the dictates of pc, and my own sense of humor) of those who wrote the memos (with the overtaxed assistance of their administrative assistants), and is discouraged and disparaged only by those courageous souls, the company proofreaders.
Andrew Brown
On 9/7/06 5:17 AM, "Penny McCarthy" <penmc@BTCONNECT.COM> wrote:
Dear List,
I’m sure it can be an advantage to write in a foreign language, and there can be advantages in writing in a foreign language and one could go on about the advantages of writing in a foreign language. But could I raise an odd prepositional use by Nabokov himself in Lolita: ‘in result of’. That’s not American idiom, is it? UK English would say ‘as a result of’. Is there a shadow of another language there?
Penny.
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