Word Watch: As

An obsolete usage of this word has established itself, like a Japanese weed, so rapidly in our higher journalism.

“I am as intelligent as you”. Here’s a formulation that has begun to invade a completely different construction, of the type “Much as I should like to come, I’m afraid I am otherwise engaged”. Now we find that the first “as” from the other phrase can be found in sentences that do not require it: “As painful as the David Blaine endurance ordeal must be for him …” (Daily Telegraph leader, 15 September 2003).

Until recently, the sentence would probably have run “Painful as the David Blaine endurance ordeal must be …” “To begin with, as hard as it may be for a supermarket-jaded city dweller to believe, ‘stone age’ hunter-gatherers are erudite botanists …” (Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, 1994, Penguin ed. p. 421).

Pinker writes well, if colloquially, and only irritates when deploying obvious Americanisms (like the ridiculous “around and around”). I am fairly sure that the redundant usage, “as hard as …” comes from America, where confusion between constructions is commonplace. Odd, though, that it has established itself, like a Japanese weed, so rapidly in our higher journalism.

But this construction appears to have evolved before the nineteenth century. I find an example of “as … as” in this sense dating from 1740: “As high as my expectation was raised, I confess, the magnificence of the city infinitely surpasses it”. (Thomas Gray writing to his mother from Rome, 2 April 1740). And John Wesley’s Dictionary (1753, two years before Johnson’s) has a preliminary “Note to the reader” that begins: “As incredible as it may appear, I must avow, that this dictionary is not published to get money …”.

I would maintain that, during most of the 19^th and 20th centuries there were two distinct constructions, used in different contexts. (Pinker himself discounts the authority of 18^th-century usage when a more modern one has become established.)

Nevertheless, I find the following sentence more confusing than it would have been without the first “as”: “The real problem is not rebel judges – as liberal as many of them undoubtedly are – but judges sticking too faithfully to flawed ministerial instruction.” (Spectator, 17 June 2006).

This question was dealt with in the Spectator for December 2006, which concluded: “I cannot believe our own age is suddenly leaping back to a construction that includes the antecedent as, since it disappeared two and a half centuries ago. I rather think we are seeing today the confused carrying over into the concessive construction [of] the ordinary comparative construction ‘as bright as gold’”.

Just as I said. The unlikely 200-year-old, apparently obsolete, usage is back, and I’m inclined to think it has been revived because the terser and more efficient form has been forgotten in the general wreck of disciplined syntax that has overtaken the language in the last fifty years.

While we’re on the subject: “As” is involved in another contemporary case of redundancy: “Equally as” is often used instead of “as” simply: “Among names for girls, Samantha is equally as common as Sharon”.

“Equally” seems to be a clarification of the parallel, but it is redundant. It can and should be omitted.