Mind your language
There has been a mysterious change in the way people use the word as. It is in the construction of the kind, ‘Tall as he was, he could not reach the branch.’ Now they introduce an extra as: ‘As tall as he was, he could not reach the branch.’ These little words are a nuisance because of the syntactical force they muster. The as to which I am referring is a conjunctive adverb introducing a clause. In the big Oxford English Dictionary, which devotes about 7,000 words to as, the sense under consideration is B, I, 3, b.
This occurs ‘in parenthetical clauses forming an extension of the subject or predicate’. Here, the dictionary notes, ‘the antecedent (so, as) formerly present is now omitted, and the relative has acquired somewhat of a concessive force = Though, however’. In our example, one might in orthodox modern English say, ‘Tall though he was.’ The dictionary quotes Richardson’s Pamela: ‘Bad as his actions were.’ That is the standard form we use today, omitting the ‘antecedent’ as. Richardson’s novel was published in1742, but 15 years earlier Jonathan Swift, a man of a previous generation, was writing, ‘The world, as censorious as it is, hath been so kind.’ If you go back through the centuries, you can find constructions even less familiar, for the simple word as descends from all-so, or in Old English all-swa. Our Anglo-Saxon forebears would say, ‘Swa beorht swa gold’ (as bright as gold). In that construction, the first swa is demonstrative or antecedent, and the second swa is relative, as if one were saying ‘in that degree bright, in which degree gold (is bright)’.
Once the emphatic all had been added, the construction by 1200 had become ‘alswa brihht alswa gold’. After that, erosion wore down the alswa to as. (Sometimes alswa gave us so, and we can say either, ‘Not as clever as she thinks she is’, or, ‘Not so clever as she thinks she is.’) But history has settled things so that, in the sense we are considering, the antecedent as is omitted. 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 the ordinary comparative construction ‘as bright as gold’.
To my ears the extra as makes ‘as tall as he was’ (in the concessive sense) sound ungrammatical. But if it stays with us, I shall have to adjust my ears.
Dot Wordsworth
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