Dot Wordsworth

Meet with

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

issue 18 March 2017

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.

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