The phrase "a sort of surrogate" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing something that acts as a substitute or replacement for something else, often in a metaphorical sense.
Example: "In her absence, her sister became a sort of surrogate mother, providing the care and support that was needed."
Alternatives: "a kind of substitute" or "a type of replacement".
The family consists of a man, a woman and an overzealous dog, who functions as a sort of surrogate for the young reader.
He boarded at Ardingly College, a public school in Sussex run on Christian principles, which provided a sort of surrogate family and where he was head boy.
"Eventually Rushdoony took him under his wing and became a sort of surrogate father for North, who married one of Rushdoony's daughters".
She was so funny.' Thompson was originally a friend of Judy Garland's but took over as a sort of surrogate mother to Minnelli after Garland's death in 1969 and was staying at Minnelli's house when she died 10 years ago.
"But no doubt getting to the end of something like Brass Eye, where you've been forced to be a sort of surrogate lawyer, well, that's the most creatively stifling thing you could possibly do".
Tells about his early life; Oscar Hammerstein II served as a sort of surrogate father--describes an afternoon at fifteen when Hammerstein went over a primitive musical Sondheim had written with great seriousness.
And what casts these outrageous assertions and suggestions in a simulated light of documentary authority is the onscreen reporter, D'Souza, who presents himself as a sort of Obama surrogate or Obama double, revealing his similarities to Obama in order to assert his intellectual and moral authority on the subject.
Lex felt a similar "sort of surrogate" relationship when playing one of Willy Loman's sons in Death of a Salesman.
There's a comical cinema-centricity to "Gorgeous Girl," including a subplot involving a fanatical boy movie-maker (a sort of young-Truffaut surrogate in a cosseting household) and a plethora of on-screen movie in-references (including one ironic, bitter, and utterly apt one, in a jail cell, to Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket").
And, as a paper just published in Science outlines, for one sort of cuckoo and one sort of surrogate parent, that does appear to be the case.In this section BICEP flexes its muscles Jurassic mark Acid test Paying guests Fat chance ReprintsFriend or foe Daniela Canestrari of Oviedo University, in Spain, and her colleagues looked at relations between great spotted cuckoos and carrion crows.
