Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

} dontbother wrote:
}
}> Dandelion <Dandelion@greenfield.com> wrote
}>
}> > Are these sentences using 'short', 'short of', and 'short on' all
}> > valid?  Is one better than the other?
}>
}> No. They're all ungrammatical because the last word has to be plural.
}>
}> > Poll sites were short Chinese translator.
}> > Poll sites were short of Chinese translator.
}> > Poll sites were short on Chinese translator.
}>
}> 1. Poll sites were short Chinese translators.
}> 2. Poll sites were short of Chinese translators.
}> 3. Poll sites were short on Chinese translators.
}>
}> Now they are all fine. Which one to choose is a matter of preference.
}
} I suspect that there are fine shadings of sense there.  "Short on"
} seems, from scanning some Google results, to want to go with some
} divisible mass--one might be short on results, or short on charisma, or
} short on quality, or the like.  "Short of" seems the term used for
} enumerable things--a group might be short of men, or short of blank
} ballots, or short of teachers; it also is used when the sense is of
} physically or metaphorically not quite reaching a goal--they were a
} yard short of a first down, they fell short of the targets set by the
} accord, that sort of thing.
}
} I don't pretend for a moment that those are bright-line distinctions or
} anything close to--just that there seems to be in each case something
} of a drift in those directions.  But I think that's why #2 seems the
} better choice.
}
} Bare "short" could, I suppose, be taken to be either form, though I
} suspect a majority, given a fill-in-the-blank test, would supply "of"
} as the elided word.  It's a form best avoided when there is any least
} possibility of a reader seeing, even for an instant, a misreading with
} "short" looking like an adjective modifying whatever noun or noun
} phrase follows (which will be the case whenever that noun is something
} that plausibly could be described as being "short").

The WordE of it is correct as far as it goes, but there's another version
that's hard to fit with a plural "Poll sites" (which in MLE ought to be
"Polling places"): "The polling place at the university was short a
Chinese translator."

Not in my (BrE) ideolect they aren't.   1 is simply impossible, 3 is not
likely and is probably marked to me as American, 2 is fine.

But were "short on" to be part of my working vocab, this is how it feels
it would work for me.