Grumpy Grammarians

A few days ago, I looked up the word of in Fowler's Modern English Usage (2nd rev'd edn). Here's what greeted me:

This preposition shares with another word of the same length, AS, the evil glory of being accessary to more crimes against grammar than any other. But, in contrast with the syntax of as, which is so difficult that blunders are very excusable, that of of is so simple that only gross carelessness can lead anyone astray with it. Nevertheless, straying is perpetual, and the impression of amateurishness produced on an educated reader of newspapers is discreditable to the English Press (p. 409).

An intro. such as this made me hesitant to read on: what sort of amateurish dunderhead, or worse, grammar-criminal would I be shown to be? Nevertheless, plow on I did. Following his curmudgeonly introduction, Fowler lists and gives examples of seven common 'of-blunders':

... (1) Wrong patchings; (2) Patching the unpatchable; (3) Side-slip; (4) Irresolution; (5) Needless repetition; (6) Misleading ommission; (7) Some freaks of idiom. [If you'd like to see these explained or exemplified, let me know.]

The irony of my time in pages 409-10 of Fowler was that, erudite and scathing as his comments were, they didn't help me solve my of-problem. The solution came as, stretched out on my back on the lounge room floor, I picked over the problem with my wife.

The moral?

Common sense applied to a specific usage problem counts for as much as a headful of general grammatical principles. Just don't tell the likes of Fowler I said it!