Addicted “to,” not “with”

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From Daily Writing Tips:

Some verbs and participle adjectives are followed by a specific preposition. Different from phrasal verbs, which can be replaced by a single word, prepositional verbs are verbs that stand alone, but are followed by a particular preposition.

The verb addict (and its related forms) is one of these. Its signature preposition is to. For example:

Back in the 1960s and 70s, physicians used to treat alcoholism with Valium, then the patients would get addicted to the Valium.

I was surprised to come across the following sentence in an article in Psychology Today:

Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV.

One has an addiction to entertainment, not with it.

Going straight to the Ngram Viewer, I searched addicted to and addicted with to see if I was missing a shift in usage. Addicted with flatlined across the graph from 1800 to the present.

Next, I cast about the web in search of the phrase addicted with. My search was impeded by the existence of a book that has “addicted with” in the title.

I found few examples. Most were in readers’ comments, which are notorious for nonstandard usage:

I am still reading, but what I have read up to now has given me insight into how to deal with my family member who is addicted with the drug.”—Reader’s comment on wikiHow article.

Why do people get addicted with someone or something?—Quora comment

. . . .

afflicted: grievously distressed, tormented; troubled; oppressed, downtrodden.

Here are some examples of afflicted with:

Former workers even now are afflicted with a variety of nerve and skin diseases.

We are trained in our present-day society to attack anyone afflicted with anger.

No, this Chicago team was not afflicted with any meddlesome ball-deflecting fans.

Bottomline: People are addicted to something, not with it.

Link to the rest at Daily Writing Tips

If ngram is a new term for any visitors to The Passive Voice, here’s a description from Wikipedia:

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application. The n-grams typically are collected from a text or speech corpus.

. . . .

n-gram models are widely used in statistical natural language processing. In speech recognition, phonemes and sequences of phonemes are modeled using a n-gram distribution.

. . . .

For sequences of words, the trigrams (shingles) that can be generated from “the dog smelled like a skunk” are “# the dog”, “the dog smelled”, “dog smelled like”, “smelled like a”, “like a skunk” and “a skunk #”.

For those unfamiliar to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, here’s a link. PG thinks many will find it easy-to-use and a bit diverting.