Increasingly in the last decade, American media English has been swept up in the tide of hypertrophic variants in all sectors of grammar. This tendency has now come to affect the form of prepositions after verbs, such that the standard transitive variant enter in––as in “enter in the lottery”––is being routinely replaced by “enter into the lottery,” etc. Perhaps a contributing factor in this case is the related intransitive form, as in phrases like “enter into an agreement,” but the fact of a powerful contemporary tropism toward hypertrophy in American English is undeniable on its face, of which bloated prepositions as verbal complements are yet another instance.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO