Mary at eyes.puzzling.org asks "Is "big of a deal" as in 'it's not that big of a deal' a US usage, or am I just missing out on a trend?"
Kenneth Wilson discusses this in The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:
of a occurs more and more frequently in Nonstandard Common and Vulgar English in uses such as It’s not that big of a deal; She didn’t give too long of a talk; How hard of a job do you think it’ll be? All these are analogous to How much of a job will it be?, which is clearly idiomatic and Standard, at least in the spoken language where it most frequently occurs. It is possible, therefore, that the first three could achieve idiomatic status too before long, despite the objections of many commentators.
Another possible source is suggested by an observation attributed to Groucho Marx:
Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
It's interesting that Wilson's examples all involve positive-end scalar predicates: big, long, hard. The adjectives from the other ends of such scales show up less often in this construction, both absolutely and in proportion to the frequency of each particular adjective itself. The numbers below are Google hits (which are document counts rather than word or phrase counts, but they'll do):
| ADJ of a | ADJ | |
| big | 161,000 |
133M |
| small | 18,500 |
116M |
| hard | 10,300 |
89.5M |
| easy | 4,020 |
79.6M |
| far | 9,120 |
62.1M |
| near | 624 |
48.8M |
The case of long and short is a problem, because "short of a" has another meaning that is very common, as in "one can short of a six pack" or "just short of a miracle". We can avoid this by checking "too long of a" and "too short of a", which show the same effect, as do heavy and light:
| too ADJ of a | ADJ | |
| long | 12,400 |
152M |
| short | 5,830 |
69.2M |
| heavy | 1,540 |
27.5M |
| light | 690 |
77.2M |