Timeline for Active usage of "taken aback"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 24, 2012 at 17:45 | comment | added | alcas | Thanks for the references. I like @PeterShor's Ngram - that is pretty good evidence (that I somehow didn't think to look for when composing my question) that the passive version really is way more common. I'd love to see that posted in an answer not a comment. | |
| Nov 24, 2012 at 13:18 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Google Ngrams doesn't show any decline of usage in the active voice. It shows, rather, an increase of usage in the passive voice, but that doesn't mean that the active is becoming non-standard. | |
| Nov 24, 2012 at 10:19 | comment | added | Barrie England | You might want to argue that the active use is archaic, or that is rare, but that doesn't make it nonstandard. Citations in both the COCA and the BNC overwhelmingly show the passive form, but there are also records in the COCA such as ‘That took Clarence aback a little’ (2011) and ‘But it took me aback’ (2010), and, in the BNC, ‘The directness of my attack clearly took him aback’ (1991) and ‘The colonists had enough newspapers to take any visiting Englishman aback’ (1984). None of those strikes me as being nonstandard. | |
| Nov 24, 2012 at 10:07 | comment | added | Fortiter | Since the latest of the three references dates from 1889, it would be fair to say that the construction is NOW non-standard. | |
| Nov 24, 2012 at 7:31 | history | answered | Barrie England | CC BY-SA 3.0 |