“In a recent interview, [Mark] Rowswell talked about how bored he was of always playing the role of a Western student …” – London Review of Books, May 2021.
In the early years of the century, I noticed examples of the usage “bored of” with amazement. It had always been regarded as a solecism, used principally by children and the uneducated, and was acceptable only as a “realistic” transcription of vernacular speech. The universally recognised correct form was “bored with”.
Then suddenly, the “illiterate” form was everywhere: “…small adjustments to the format started to be made, as they often are when executives get bored of a long-running programme” (Private Eye, September 2003).
“… the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort, who have become so bored of the best caviar in the world that they no longer eat it” – Daily Telegraph, October 2005.
In the Summer of 2006, I noted: “‘bored of’ seems, predictably, to have become firmly established as standard usage, in print and in conversation”. So it will appear a trifle tardy of me to complain about it now. But once again, I’m not so much complaining as putting it on record that this is really a new construction, or, to be more precise, an old, “incorrect” construction given new authority by the sheer weight of current usage. I’m also registering bafflement at the way so many writers, many of them literate and self-aware, simultaneously opt for a usage that was virtually unknown, or regarded as unacceptable, until recently.
I do not, for instance, think that when Max Egremont wrote in his book Siegfried Sassoon, A Biography of 2005 the sentence “… Sassoon thought Gosse and Marsh were bored of him”, he did so in a spirit of self-conscious modernity. He, a highly literate writer, was surely using what he felt was correct English. His book is about an accomplished writer of English – a famous poet, indeed. In writing that sentence he wasn’t “making a statement”, claiming to belong to a younger generation or deliberately asserting his sympathy with a new order. By the date of his book, indeed, the usage had become correct by general, but quite unconscious, agreement. The process is one I’ve noted often enough, but I’m still taken by surprise when educated, far-from-young writers adopt idioms as though in sympathy with a new generation and a new culture. Such is the nature of change, though I can hardly call it “progress”, since there’s no question of improvement. An English sentence is no better for the confirmation of the previously informal turn of phrase. We can only say that, like the adoption of informal clothes, it has the effect of including people who had before been deemed “beyond the pale”. The question, then, is whether this expansion of the common idiom is a cultural benefit. This is the way language changes, whatever our personal view, so let us accept the now well-established fact with a good grace.
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