There is an idiom to shop (something) around which means, more or less, to present (something) to a variety of potential buyers to see who will make the best offer for purchase. The example given, “to shop Teixeira” is just a truncated version of this idiom, dropping the around.
Some examples of this idiom from COCA:
- But how serious could he have been about leaving Sacramento if he didn't have a high-profile agent to shop him around the league, someone who might have bullied or bluff-ed the Kings into talling sign-and-trade with other teams?
- For a fee, his company will build a prototype and shop it around. If a corporation bites, Davison shares royalties with inventors.
- They get a good idea, shop it around, raise some capital, then sell it off to a bigger company
- Insurers sometimes shop patients around to a series of IMEs, flying them out of state and putting them up at motels.
- And how do you know if you're getting a fair shake? # " I always tell people to shop it around, " said Nedler. " Take it two or three places. You have to trust who you're dealing with.
The shortened version seems commonly used in a sports context:
- In fact, with the trade deadline coming up Monday, the Bears ought to shop him now and try to retrieve something in return.
- The idea, they said, was to be up front with free agent Monk during a time when he also could shop himself to the highest NFL bidder.
This truncated version possibly developed from cases like the first example above (shop him around the league), where the phrasal verb to shop ___ around was reanalyzed as a normal transitive verb to shop ___ that takes an optional prepositional phrase with around—as in around the league. Notice that the example shop patients around to a series of IMEs uses “around to”, which is what you’d expect with a phrasal verb.
This idiom is not the same idiom as to shop (a business) or to shop (a selection of products), which is what the other examples are. People definitely use shop in this way. Here are a few examples of this in COCA:
- Draw up a grocery list for the " big " holiday meal before you go shopping. Divide the list by section and shop the store in that order.
- Sam's Club stores are huge and carry not only electronics, but everything from auto accessories to food to pharmaceuticals... But: You may need to shop the store repeatedly to recoup the $35 annual membership fee.
- " We shop the farmers markets for amazing things like raw dates on the stem, red burgundy okra, romanesco, and saturn peaches, " says Holly Vesecky of Holly Flora in Los Angeles.
- I am a die hard fashionista and, you know, I shop the sales.
- Before he could ink a deal, he was automatically switched to TXU Energy... His price jumped 71 percent overnight, to 18.8 cents a kilowatt hour from 11 cents. " No way was I going to pay that, " says Mr. Dreese. He was able to shop the market and switch to another retailer for 13.3 cents a kilowatt hour.
To me, this idiom to shop ___ is different from to shop at ___ because it implies a slightly more intense sense of intention to the shopping.
Your analyses of (1) and (2) are both correct. They do indeed refer to the ‘as X as Y (is)’ construction.
Your analysis on (3), however, is not quite right. ‘Ever’ when used as an intensifier is confined (as far as I can think of) to three specific circumstances:
With comparatives: When used before a comparative adjective, ever intensifies the comparativeness of the adjective (not the meaning of the adjective itself) and means something like ‘increasingly’: “He had to borrow ever larger sums of money to cover his gambling debts”. [Registers: all]
With ‘so’: The phrase ‘ever so’ cannot really be split up or analysed, semantically: it just means ‘very’: “Oh, he was ever so bright as a child”. [Registers: informal, colloquial]
With interrogatives/indefinites: When used after an interrogative or indefinite pronoun/determiner (often cliticised), ‘ever’ intensifies the meaning of the interrogative/indefinite: “However are we going to do that?” – “I can see nothing whatever”. [Registers: mostly somewhat formal; not common in informal or colloquial use]
In other cases, ‘ever’ has a more literal meaning: ‘at any time’ (used in questions and negatives), or ‘at all times’ (used in positive statements, somewhat rarer than the negative/interrogative use).
This is also the case in the sentence you quote: it means ‘at any time in the past’ here, and it refers to the verb, ‘heard’. The placement of the adverb before the subject and verb is rather formal and somewhat archaic, but may still occasionally be seen even in Modern English. The verb is in the simple past tense in this example, which is also somewhat archaic—in current English, you would usually expect to see a pluperfect there. Thus, the sentence can be recast with no difference in meaning as:
[H]e stood Farrington a half-one, saying it was as smart a thing as he had ever heard.
The construction “(that) ever [subject] [verb]” is quite common in older literature and folk songs; for example, the traditional Scottish and Irish song The Parting Glass uses it several times (with ‘ever’ being contracted to its poetic/archaic variant ‘e’er’):
Of all the money e’er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm e’er I’ve done,
Alas! it was to none but me.
Oh, all the comrades e’er I had,
They’re sorry for my going away,
And all the sweethearts e’er I had,
They’d wish me one more day to stay.
These examples also show that the simple past tense and the perfect/pluperfect are fairly interchangeable in this particular construction.
Best Answer
The meanings are different. At Google Books:
"One thing I found it hard to"
About 31 results
See:
This is where the whole situation that requires quite a description
"the whole situation about Cornelia's mother never offering her anything to eat"
was difficult to cope with.
On the other side, without "it":
"One thing I found hard to"
About 63 results
E.g.
Here the thing/idea itself was hard to swallow.
[EDIT] OK, prompted by a question from Peter Schor (thank you, Peter), I've continued my research.
The main point is that "find" is a transitive verb and it must be provided with a clear/recognizable direct object.
The "one thing" in front of the verb is confusing the situation, as it can be taken to be that direct object.
Let's separate the antecedents from the verb, by using an "and." Now at Google Books we find:
"and find it hard to understand"
About 4,360 results
"and find hard to understand"
About 84 results
We can conclude here that an long infinitive such as "to understand" is not seen by "find" as a clear-enough direct object, and that "it" becomes necessary, which I believe is coded in some grammar books/rules.
Now, what happens when "one/the thing" pops in right in front of "I found," thus in the proximity of the verb?
Well, as shown by the examples in the above, if what follows "hard" is a clear short infinitive phrase such as "to swallow" "one thing" is taken as the verbal object, and the need for "it" disappears. Other examples:
"One thing I found hard to believe" "the one thing I found hard to give up—the ocean"
However, if what follows "hard" is a complicated infinitive phrase such as "to be generous about Cornelia's mother never offered me anything to eat", it seems that the native speakers feel the need to switch the focus after "find," "one thing" becomes negligible as a direct object and "it" becomes necessary.
I believe this is a matter of subjective judgement, which the native speakers perform on the fly — thus the variation.
This is the best I could come up with for now.