I just read a UK news report in The Guardian in which there was a quote from Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats:
Boris Johnson’s shrinking majority makes it clear that he has no mandate to crash us out of the EU.
'crash us out'? To me, 'crash out' is an intransitive verb, so it cannot have an object such as 'us'. In the COCA corpus, there are 17 tokens of 'crash out', but none of 'crash us out'.
If one of my students were to write 'crash us out', I would mark it as an error; but seeing as it was produced by the leader of one of the main political parties in the UK, instead we might regard it as an indication of the ways that English is changing, even if this change is not yet reflected in a corpus such as COCA.
This is, of course, problematic: people in the UK have innovative usage, reflecting the ways the language is changing; but similar usage in places such as Brunei is treated as an error. Maybe we need to be more tolerant of all innovative usage, wherever it occurs.
