Meet the newest pet peeve

It concerns me that there are people who use "concerning" as an adjective.

"Son, it is concerning to me that you won't put the candy back on the shelf when I ask you to."

"The bank tells me that the account does not exist even though you told me on Monday that it did. I find this concerning. Very concerning."


::shudder::

As my eleventh-grade English teacher used to ask: "Is this what drugs does to you?"


Edit: gurdonark tells me that this is part of southern (US) regional dialect. A Google search for the phrase "very concerning" turns up a bunch of sites in the UK as well. I don't recall hearing "concerning" used this way before, but it's possible that I did and thought at the time that it was merely an anomaly. The verb "concern" just doesn't work that way for me. The phrase "very concerning" sounds as wrong to me as "very running," which in my dialect is very, very wrong.

Linguistic oddities

Okay, we have now established that my problem concerning "concerning" as an adjective is not a problem shared by everyone. There is another grammatical issue which I have known for a long time is my issue and mine (apparently) alone, and that issue has to do with infinitives as the subjects of clauses.

See, here's the problem: For me, if an infinitive is compared to anything, it must be compared to another infinitive. I have no problem with, for example, "To love is to suffer," or "To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven." But if you were to say to me, "To love is the great Amulet that makes this world a garden," I would cringe and want to find a silent corner in which to weep piteously, even though Robert Louis Stevenson supposedly said it first.

Anybody else have an oddity like this in their dialect?


(Oh, that last sentence reminds me: I use singular they without apology or remorse.)