Learn English – “Bash something” vs. “bash on something”

grammaticalityprepositionstransitivityverbsword-choice

I was looking into my dictionary that lists many uses of the verb bash but always transitive ones.

According to that, I would expect to say:

He bashed him.
He bashed the chair.

But I can see examples on the Internet saying e.g.:

I'm not gonna bash on people for speeding through.

How come? Why not just "bash people"?

Best Answer

Not to bash on the bloggers, but that sounds rather informal to me. Ngrams indicates the literature is much more well-disciplined.

enter image description here Note: Flipping through the results found for "bash on" (the yellow line) reveals mostly hits where the word is not being used that way (e.g., "We're all going to the bash on Friday.")

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