Dot Wordsworth

Meet with

Ernest Gowers is wrong. This is a phrasal verb with a purpose

Don’t tell my husband, but I have been having doubts. (He never reads this column, so our secret is safe.) The doubt is about meet with. I always regarded it is a pleonasm, and a rebarbative one, being of American origin.

Theresa May made a mark, one way or another, by meeting President Trump. She didn’t meet him by chance, she met with him (by appointment), as several British papers said, never mind the American ones. And she didn’t meet with him as one meets with a misfortune.

Meet with and its ampler form meet up with are examples of the ‘phrasal verb’, a term that (though found here and there earlier) was adopted in 1923 by Logan Pearsall Smith, that Anglocentric American. He was a man given to depression and high spirits alternately and was greatly amused by the obituaries that appeared prematurely when he was taken ill with misery on a visit to Iceland. Anyway he was good enough to credit the philologist Henry Bradley for the invention of phrasal verb.

Samuel Johnson rightly observed in the preface to his Dictionary (1755) that there is a ‘kind of composition more frequent in our language than perhaps in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty’. He gave examples of fall on, fall in and fall off, set in, set out and set off. The foreigner could not guess the meaning of each from the meaning of the adverbs or prepositions used.

Are they really prepositions? When Churchill made the joke about things ‘up with which he would not put’ he was satirising schoolmarm pedants prohibiting ‘prepositions’ at the end of a sentence.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in