Television. As an American, I’m duty bound to get all my culture via someone else’s filter.
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The gentleman doth protest to much, methinks…
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Nothing depicting anything in the past 80-100 years, I’ll be bound. Been watching too many historical costume dramas, have we? 
My grandmother said it, so a dated US southern thing perhaps?
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I protest too much and perhaps I protest to much amusement, but I do NOT
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Wait, couldn’t you have a sentence like, “She led a protest of women from the local community,” or, “It was a protest of men who were dissatisfied with their lot in life?”
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You were protesting (against) “to” quite a lot
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Yes. It was the women’s protest or the men’s protest. The of indicates the possessive. Not the object of the protest, which was the originally offending usage.
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Sari.
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You could of just ignored it.
(ducks)
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No. I would not have let it lie! 
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When I moved to England I was bemused by the use of “half”, as in “Let’s meet at half seven.” I’d irritate my friends with, “you want to meet at 3.5?”
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[quote=“ChuckV, post:25, topic:195489, full:true”]
My high school tennis coach (Midwest, 1990s) was the only person who has ever used this in my earshot. He’s a Jewish/Italian guy from Manhattan. Maybe he knew some elderly Brits from a specific region, or maybe this usage gets around more than we think?
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‘Half’ as an abbreviation for ‘half past’.
I gather that in German it would mean 6.30 - i.e. half TO seven. This may account for the earlier discussed ‘fifteen of three’. (I.e. half of three meaning 2.30 in places in US where English was acquired by Germanic-speaking immigrants.)
And (vaguely relevantly) BBC Radio 4’s Today programme which is on from 6am-9am has a rule that presenters are forbidden from saying things like 7.30 or 7.45 or even 7.10 or 7.15. They must say ten past seven, quarter past seven, half past seven, twenty three minutes to eight, and so on. I’m not even certain they aren’t supposed to say the number of minute past or to rather than half or quarter.
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And while I’m here bemoaning misuse of prepositions, allow me to entertain with another preposition misuse rant…
What’s with all the things that are ‘based off of’.
'He started a company based off of that research"
Ok - so he formed a company that was not based ON that research. It can’t have been based ON that research because you just said it was based OFF of that research.
Things are based ON, not based OFF OF!!
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And “centered around.” Ugh
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Oh, Dog - yes - that one too! Things that are centred around are not centred on, by definition.
I swear it IS all part of a war on prepositions being prosecuted under/over/with/alongside/off but not BY speakers of American English.
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Agreed. I am often embarrassed by the expressions my fellow Americans use, and would gladly invite them to read your comments on this subject. If only I could be sure that like-minded people would serve as members of the jury in my case. The widespread use of incorrect turns of phrase might one day cause me to succumb to an urge to throttle some young person who repeatedly claims to be “embarrassed of” someone else… 
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I fear that ‘of’ has become the preposition of default for the hard of thinking. If I were to be kind I’d put it down to insufficient paper-based (literature) reading in formative years and too much internet reading where half the writers have no clue - so it becomes self-perpetuating.
And ‘of’ has even inserted itself where it has no more business being than any other preposition. Is it too much of a demand to ask people to note that it is really not too big a deal to ask them to stop saying too big OF a deal.
this usage could have been influenced by phrases like “a whale of a good time,” “a monster of a party,” and so on.
In those constructions, with a noun described in terms of another noun, the “of” is standard English: “a prince of a man” … “a devil of a time” …“that rascal of a boy” … “a little jewel of a cottage” …“a hell of a mess.”
This is a time-honored English usage. Among literary examples, the Oxford English Dictionary cites “his little concubine of a wife,” from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922).
And evidence in the OED shows that noun phrases with “hell of a …” and “devil of a …” have long been part of the language, dating back to the 1680s and 1740s, respectively.
So that construction—noun + “of a” + noun—is standard English, acceptable even in the best writing.
However, when an adjective is part of the pattern—adjective + “of a” + noun—some usages are standard and some aren’t.
In standard English, we commonly use certain adjectives of quantity—“much,” “more,” “less,” “enough”—in this way, as in “enough of a problem” and “too much of a drive.”
But with adjectives of degree—“good/bad,” “big/small,” “long/short,” “old/young,” “hard/easy,” “near/far,” and so on—the “of a” pattern is not considered standard English.
With that class of adjectives, the “of”-less versions are regarded as standard: “not that big a problem,” “too long a drive,” etc.
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IMO, unnecessary additions are worse. It means making more of an effort to be wrong. I’m still wondering how people begin a sentence with “Being that,” instead of saying, “Since…” The KISS principle has been lost.
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