Can something be "vapid of" something?
The United States Department of Agriculture defines “food deserts” as “parts of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas” (emphasis added). Neither OED nor M-W defines vapid in a way that seems to fit this usage at all. Is this just yet another case of our federal government’s “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue,” or is this some usage that is gaining currency but that dictionaries have not yet caught up with?
P.S.: I draw a blank searching the actual usda.gov site for this definition, but it seems pretty widely quoted around the Web, including in an issue of the American Nutrition Association newsletter from four or five years ago. Maybe the USDA corrected a usage error when it was pointed out to them.
I agree with Jim and HotLicks that this is a misuse by someone who misunderstands the word and its use.
The two examples cited by Josh61 are instructive, and show how the misunderstanding might arise. The first is acceptable:
The young heroes are vapid of expression
Here the of phrase is a modifier telling us what is vapid: the heroes' expressions. It might in older English be paraphrased as of vapid expression, or in Present-Day English as vapid in expression.
But readers unfamiliar with the word might assume that the of phrase was complementary, as it is in empty of X or (as Jeff suggests) devoid of X. That would cause them to think that the collocation vapid of X explains what is lacking, and lead to misuses like your example, or Josh61's second one:
the mind vapid of ... content
A Google search turns up:
- This page
- The page the OP mentions
- Someone saying "the most vapid of slogans"
I think it fair to say that everyone's intuition -- that the USDA example is just some bureaucrat mutilating the language -- is correct.