I sometimes hear some people saying,
- it's not that good "of an idea" or
- it's not that big "of a deal".
Is there a difference between above statements and statements below?
- It's not a good idea.
- It's not a big deal.
Learn English – It’s not that good “of an idea”
american-englishcolloquial-languageprepositions
Related Solutions
I see no reason why you should make a point of avoiding interesting for. It's not so common as interesting to, but it's been growing steadily over the past century, from about 1:30 in 1914 to about 1:6 in 2008 (Google Ngrams):
However, there is a possible ambiguity with interesting for. The for participates in two very different constructions. One is the ordinary preposition phrase which indicates who is interested; this is how your examples use it:
This point of view would be interesting for me —that is, I would be interested in this point of view.
The other construction is the FOR ... TO non-finite clause acting as the complement of interesting. (And in fact, historically the first construction appears to have arisen out of this one.)
This point of view would be interesting for me to hear. ... This may be parsed two ways:
Hearing this point of view would interest me.
My hearing this point of view would interest somebody.
In conversation the ambiguity is ordinarily trivial, since we take it for granted that the interested person and the hearer are the same. But what about this?
This point of view would be interesting for President Obama to hear.
Does that mean that hearing this point of view would interest the President, or that I would find it interesting if he heard it?
So you don't need to avoid using interesting for, but you do need to be careful how you use it.
There is hardly any difference.
Normally we would just say "She is John's mother.", but we could say "mother to John" or "mother of John".
The simile is perhaps more common "She is like a mother to John" (perhaps she is an older sister who takes care of baby John). The "mother of" form is also seen in "Mary, mother of Jesus", for example. Also, you are unlikely to use "to" in phrases like "mother of three".
Best Answer
If an idea is not good then it is not good. But an idea can be good but not that good of an idea. That here restricts how good something is, meaning it's not as good as someone claims it is, either now or previously.
I thought baking the chicken in coca cola would be a good idea. And it was a good idea, but just not that good of an idea (as originally thought).
So it was still a good idea but not as good as originally thought.
Sometimes we might say this as a step toward deciding or confessing that it was indeed not a good idea at all. Or someone who doesn't think that it is a good idea might say it's not that good of an idea instead of just saying straight out that it's not a good idea. Anyway, sometimes we can't always be sure if our different opinion will be in line with the final verdict.
The concepts apply for deal and for a huge amount of nouns. Giving George a TV for Christmas was a good idea, but it wasn't that good of an idea; it was more like a mediocre idea.