English as a Second Floor Landing
From an article about a Mexican heather called Limelight:
“Colder zones will treat them as annuals, with everyone relishing in the fact that the purchase resulted in season-long performance.”
Wait a minute, I thought. Relish is a transitive verb. You can relish something or revel in it, but you can’t relish in something. And then I thought, so what? Annual used to be an adjective.
Like any language, English evolves through debasement. By the time it gets upstairs, it’s ready to go out onto the patois and into the jargon. In its second story, it becomes a full-blown dialect, and there are pidgins in the attic.
So why bother with intransigent verbs?