jealous of/about

[Mobin Shabani]

Hi everyone,

In the movie Eyes White Shut, there is a scene where Nicole Kidman asks her husband "why haven't you ever felt jealous about me?" (Her husband does not care much if she flirts with other men at a party, and she is complaining about that)

I thought the word jealous is usually followed by of when we use a person or a pronoun after it. Is the preposition about being used here because the word jealous has a different meaning (possessive)?

 

[teechar]

I thought the word jealous is usually followed by of when we use a person or a pronoun after it.

It can be, but the meaning then would be different from the one above.
For example:
My neighbour has a Porsche, and I have a cheap rusty car. I feel jealous of him. [ I envy my neighbour].

Is the preposition about being used here because the word jealous has a different meaning (possessive)?

Yes, take a look at this link:

jealous

1. upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another…

dictionary.cambridge.org

 

[jutfrank]

Jealousy is a three-part relation. As the three parts, let's take Bill, his wife Alice, and the handsome Hungarian man Szavost, with whom Alice had been dancing at the party hoping to make Bill jealous.

We can say that Alice's goal is to make Bill jealous of Szavost. It doesn't make good sense to say that Bill is jealous of Alice, since Alice is his wife, not the threat Szavost. In the pattern jealous of somebody, the object of the preposition of (i.e., the somebody part) is the person who may take something from you, not the person or thing that you may lose. So, although Alice cannot say Why haven't you ever felt jealous of me?, she can instead use 'about' to make it mean that she is the possession that would be lost, not the person who is taking the possession away.

Confusingly, 'jealous' is also very often used in a different sense, where it is synonymous with 'envious'. Envy is a two-part relation only: there is someone who desires, and something that is desired. In the pattern envious/jealous of something, the something part is usually the thing that is desired.