{"id":84,"date":"2005-09-09T13:29:38","date_gmt":"2005-09-09T13:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=84"},"modified":"2018-07-20T14:27:23","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T21:27:23","slug":"as-far-as-as-far-as","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2005\/09\/as-far-as-as-far-as\/","title":{"rendered":"As Far As ‘As Far As’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reminded driving back from USC this morning as I listened to NPR of how dissonant it feels to me when the construction ‘As far as X is concerned’ (or ‘As far as X goes’, or somesuch) is lazily collapsed to ‘As far as X’. It’s a lingustic meme that I’m guessing gets passed on verbally in a single chunk, with no consideration for what might have been left dangling \u2014 language that’s lost morphology and is only phonology. Is it a particularly American drift? I can’t remember hearing it in Britain \u2014 not that we’re any more precise when it comes to language, but I don’t think that particular laziness is one of ours.<\/p>\n

But I don’t have to guess, because someone’s done the work, amazingly enough: Syntactic variation and change in progress: Loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting AS FAR AS constructions<\/a>. Also, some brief discussion here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, when searching for this one of the first links I found was to a scholarly piece entitled Survey Results Show the Necessity for Good Grammar Instruction<\/a> in which the mistake is made not once, but twice:<\/p>\n

\nAs far as implications for teaching, these results stress the importance of teaching the standard writing dialect.
\nAs far as being bothered or not, the numbers were very close.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reminded driving back from USC this morning as I listened to NPR of how dissonant it feels to me when the construction ‘As far as X is concerned’ (or ‘As far as X goes’, or somesuch) is lazily collapsed to ‘As far as X’. It’s a lingustic meme that I’m guessing gets passed on verbally … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}