Jim Gordon wrote to point out an odd construction in this morning's NYT (Tracie Rozhon, "To Have, Hold and Cherish, Until Bedtime", 3/11/2007):
Fred Tobin, a builder in North Canton, Ohio, is friends of a prominent couple in Columbus whose house was remodeled with two master bedrooms. The wife sleeps on one side of the house, the husband on the other. “It’s a hush-hush thing,” Mr. Tobin said. “The husband travels a lot, all the time, and he comes home late, and he wants to be able to check his e-mail and go to bed without waking her up.” [emphasis added]
Google turns up about 28,000 instances of {"is friends of"}, but at least the first few hundred examples are almost all FAQs of the form "What is Friends of NRA?", "What is Friends of Fiber Art International?", "What is Friends of the Dog Park, Inc.?", etc., with a sprinkling of other uses of the Friends of X construction as a singular proper noun (e.g. "One of the groups opposed to the Potter Valley Project is Friends of the Eel River"). I couldn't find any other examples of the form "X is friends of Y", where X is a person and Y is one or more people -- so it's not surprising that Jim was surprised by this usage.
However, there's a closely related pattern, "X is friends with Y", which is very common indeed: {"is friends with"} gets 322,000 hits. A shocking number of the high-page-rank hits are math or computer-science problems, e.g. this one or this one, and some are discussions of social networking friends lists, but there are plenty of old-fashioned examples like "What's really hard to figure out about Nick, though, is that he is friends with Ramona.", or "The whole time I was friends with those girls it never occurred to me that they were not really friends with me."
Though I'm not sure I can prove it by the pattern of web hits, I have the impression that "be friends with" is an informal construction. Searching Google News for {"is friends with"}, I find that out of the first 30 hits, 13 involve sports or entertainment figures. This is relevant because sports and entertainment stories are generally written in a more informal register. Of course, it might be that 43% of all people referenced in news stories are sports or entertainment figures, I don't know.
In any case, I wonder if the phrase in the NYT article didn't start out as "... is friends with a prominent couple in Columbus ...", and then get edited (by the author or by a copy editor) to change with to of. This would make it an incorrection or a self-incorrection, of the type where someone tries to eliminate a usage that is perceived to be informal, and creates a real clunker as a result.
Some additional evidence: this story went out on the NYT wire, and was republished elsewhere (e.g. in the Seattle Times under the headline "New homes, separate his-and-her bedrooms", 3/11/2007) with with rather than of:
Fred Tobin, a builder in North Canton, Ohio, is friends with a prominent couple in Columbus whose house was remodeled with two master bedrooms. The wife sleeps on one side of the house, the husband on the other. "It's a hush-hush thing," Tobin said. "The husband travels a lot, all the time, and he comes home late, and he wants to be able to check his e-mail and go to bed without waking her up."
I don't know whether the story went out on the wire with of, and was corrected to with in Seattle, or went out with with, and was incorrected to of in New York; but my money's on the second option.
[For a discussion of an incorrection nipped in the bud by curiosity and access to the OED, see To revivify or condemn", posted on 3/10/2007 at English, Jack.]
[Update -- the plot thickens. The version of the story that ran at the Chicago Tribune, under the headline "Couples find wedded bliss more blissful in separate bedrooms", had "Fred Tobin, a builder in North Canton, Ohio, is friends of a prominent couple in Columbus whose house was remodeled with two master bedrooms." But according to someone in a position to know, the Orlando Sentinel ran the phrase as is a friend of a prominent couple in Columbus. So maybe it ran on the wire as is friends of, and editors in Seattle and Orlando corrected it in two different ways.
And Chas Belov wrote to observe that the is friends of wording also ran in the Rutland Herald and the Houston Chronicle, and that the Rutland Herald version includes editing schmutz ("(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)" and "(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)"), which strongly suggests they ran the article without looking at it. ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at March 11, 2007 11:38 AM