Bored of correctors

THE LAST STRAW, writes Linda Kidder of Essex, was hearing the expression "bored of" from the cartoon lips of Peggy Hill on the Fox TV series "King of the Hill." She may be a two-dimensional character, but as a substitute teacher, Peggy should know better.

"She kept asking, 'Hank, are you bored of me?'" complains Kidder, when she ought to have said bored with. Kidder would like to blame the idiom on Texas, where "King of the Hill" is set, but that won't work, she says: "I have heard it on the news right here in New England. How did this start?"

Not, at any rate, with that 2002 "King of the Hill" episode. High school students were using bored of -- yes, "right here in New England" -- by the early 1990s (when, incidentally, the writers of the episode were Stanford undergraduates). Some of the credit no doubt belongs to "Bored of the Rings": The Harvard Lampoon parody has been circulating for 35 years now, and the recent release of the "Lord of the Rings" movies helped keep it on the cultural map.

Of course, "Bored of the Rings" is as wrong as "bored of me," if you believe your dictionary. Bore is supposedly a transitive verb only: "You bore me" is OK, but "I'm boring of you" -- that is, "becoming bored with you" -- is not. But English speakers have begun ignoring that restriction, perhaps tempted by the analogy with tire of: We all agree that "I'm tired of crude animation" is standard English, and it's just a shuffle-step from that to "I'm bored of crude animation."

One writer who has taken that little step is Scott Anderson, who in a New York Times Magazine story last fall described an interviewee reading business cards "before boring of the task and setting them aside." That pricked up ears at linguistics web sites: Language Hat (www.languagehat.com) invited responses, and found that a goodly number of readers had no problem with bored of. Mark Liberman of Language Log (www.languagelog.org) thinks bored of is weird, but he has posted several excellent pieces on its history and possible sources.

For the moment, Liberman says, bored of is gaining ground, in Britain as well as in the United States. But those who find the news distressing should remember that we successfully coexist with some other slippery English prepositions. Some computers want you to log on, others to log in, still others to login. We've got in behalf and on behalf, compare to and compare with, cover in and cover with. Some sticklers urge us to distinguish between the variants, but their success rate is not impressive.

And then there are our British cousins, whose prepositions are often different to (if not opposite to) ours: They live in Maple Street rather than on it, they go away at the weekend, they cater for as well as cater to , they recover from surgery in hospital. And yet, we understand them well enough to read their books and steal their TV shows. So if bored of has come to stay, I won't object, though I probably won't use it, either. At least not till I've heard that Lisa Simpson approves.

. . .

TSK, TSK: That's what Charlie Elster, the pronunciation maven, has to say about the news that NBC's pronunciation guidebook instructs broadcasters to say tsunami without its initial letter, as "soonami." Elster, who's working on a revision of his "Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations," says "soonami" is not only wrong, but "inconsistent too, for [the network] calls for /t/ to be pronounced in tsetse and Tsushima." (Does it also drop the t in tsimmes and tsuris, I wonder -- or doesn't NBC speak Yiddish?) "The ts is "perfectly pronounceable in English," says Elster, so why not say it? And most dictionaries agree; unless you work for NBC, you'll be in good company if you keep the t in tsunami.

. . .

CLERIC'S CORNER: Earlier this month, The Word entertained a query about the "four corners" of the earth, an image that has long flourished even among round-earth believers. Two readers responded with the perfect commentary on the idiom, John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII, in which the poet deftly squares the circle (or circles the square). It begins:

At the round earth's imagined
corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered
bodies go. . . .

Thanks to Elly Rubin and Ellin Sarot for sending the sonnet -- and if you want the remaining 10 lines, just Google.

Email freeman@globe.com.