In the past few days, I keep seeing people misuse the phrase \"that of\" in the same kind of way, apparently for emphasis. Like this:<\/p>\n
* My primary concern is that of earthquakes.<\/p>\n
Where the speaker meant to say that their primary concern is earthquakes themselves; but that's not what \"that of earthquakes\" means.<\/p>\n
Here's one possible way to test whether you've incorrectly put \"that of\" in a sentence that has the structure \"My A<\/var> is that of B<\/var>\":<\/p>\n The problem with the above test is that there are some borderline-inappropriate uses that pass the test:<\/p>\n * My subject tonight is that of grammar.<\/p>\n * The company's core business is that of computer graphics.<\/p>\n In both cases, you could argue that the sentence is correct, and both cases sort of pass my above test: \"My subject tonight is the subject of grammar\"; \"The company's core business is the business of computer graphics.\" But in both cases, the \"that of\" is redundant.<\/p>\n So here's another test, probably better: just cut \"that of\" from the sentence, and see if the sentence still makes sense; if it does, then you were probably misusing \"that of.\"<\/p>\n I think there's a subject\/object confusion at the heart of the misuse; in the standard use of \"that of,\" the B<\/var> in the phrase \"that of B<\/var>\" is a person or organization that owns (or to which can be attributed) the thing named by A<\/var>.<\/p>\n Here's an example of how to use \"that of\" correctly:<\/p>\n His premise was that of Newton: that matter and energy are distinct.<\/p>\n In other words, his premise was the same as Newton's premise.<\/p>\n I imagine this is yet another case where my prescriptivist side will have to learn to live with the new phrasing; I suspect it's becoming more widespread over time. But it bugs me.<\/p>\n Of course, for all I know, the usage I'm objecting to has been around longer than I have; I don't currently have any easy way to check on that. If any of you know, let me know.<\/p>\n (Wrote this back in March, but neglected to post it.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the past few days, I keep seeing people misuse the phrase “that of” in the same kind of way, apparently for emphasis. Like this: * My primary concern is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n