Jose Carillo's English Forum
English Grammar and Usage Problems => Badly Written, Badly Spoken => Topic started by: Joe Carillo on October 26, 2015, 12:03:32 PM
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This question was posted by Edward G. Lim a few weeks ago on my Facebook page:
Hi Joe! I heard a couple of years ago a gentleman who said “I’m satisfied of what I’ve done in boxing.” It doesn’t sound right to me. “Satisfied of” is not a common construction, but why is it wrong, if it is indeed wrong? The more I hear such constructions, the more they sound acceptable to me.
My reply to Edward:
Yes, Edward, the construction “I’m satisfied of what I’ve done in boxing” doesn’t sound right to me either. The right phrasal verb is “satisfied with” instead of “satisfied of”: “I’m satisfied with what I’ve done in boxing.” By saying “right,” however, I don’t mean that “satisfied of” is grammatically wrong; it just so happens that “satisfied with” is the convention, the widely accepted usage among educated native English speakers.
There’s really no inherent, arguable logic in using the preposition “with” instead of “of” in the phrasal verb “satisfied with”; it’s just that people have grown accustomed to saying “satisfied with” over the centuries to express satisfaction over something. In fact, if you happen to be marooned in an island where the idiom is the phrasal verb “satisfied of” among a population of, say, 100 English speakers, you’d surely find it acceptable and sounding right yourself in less than a year. Indeed, you’d become part of the herd that finds saying “I’m satisfied of what I’ve done in boxing” the most natural thing in the world.