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Trying to decide at what point I should give up on editing "as such" when it's used to mean "therefore" or "consequently." It's EVERYWHERE. I think I'm definitely in the minority in continuing to see it as a prepositional and pronoun rather than some sort of transitional adverb.
The thing is, even if I accept that it's just a transitional adverb to everyone else, I can't seem to make it work that way for me. Every time I run across it, my brain automatically looks for some sort of noun phrase for the "such" to refer to.
I think this is basically how most usage arguments go. You can look at the data and see, for example, that nearly everyone uses "enormity" to mean "enormousness" rather than "an immoral act." But it doesn't mean "enormousness" FOR YOU, and so you just can't accept it.
The weird thing is that it doesn't work the other day—it's hard to lose your peeves, but it seems to be easy to acquire them. You read somewhere that some usage authority hates a particular usage, and suddenly you hate it too.
I still don't really understand what's going on psychologically there. Is it just the prestige of learning rules or the superior feeling of looking down on the unwashed masses?
Is it that we intrinsically trust people who call themselves authorities while we distrust the authority of the speakers of a language as a whole?
Yeah, I think the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a big part of it. You learn about a usage issue, and even though you've never noticed it before, suddenly you're attuned to it and have been primed to think it's bad. https://twitter.com/cococoyote/status/1253008898270932994
I wouldn't be surprised if the very act of noticing a usage makes you more likely to dislike it just because it's a distraction.
I wonder if anyone's looked into that. It seems like it should be easy to set up an experiment in which you teach people some usage rules—maybe one group learns real rules while another group learns rules you made up—and then measure their botheration later.
Yeah, this is something that I don't think was clear in my thread. I learned the traditional meaning of "as such" simply by reading. Nobody ever taught me that "such" needs an antecedent. And I suspect that rules we learn organically stick with us more. https://twitter.com/ElizdAnjou/status/1253012181425274880
I acquired a lot of peeves when I started editing. It was a mark of pride for me to know all of these rules. But I've also unlearned a lot of those rules over the years.
But if it's something I naturally picked up from reading, I think I'm less inclined to let go of it.
But if it's something I naturally picked up from reading, I think I'm less inclined to let go of it.
This is also a good point. And some people don't just fail to notice them in practice—they often commit the same so-called errors that they complain about. https://twitter.com/SnoozeInBrief/status/1253012984009547778
So I think there's definitely some pride in learning the rules, which you demonstrate by complaining about violations of the rules. In some ways it's just about signaling your team membership.
This is the question that I don't think anyone has a satisfactory answer to, myself included. Is it simple majority rule? Or do we have to wait until the people who object are a much smaller percentage? Or maybe wait until they're all dead? https://twitter.com/usewordsbetter/status/1253037344455897092
Does it matter if the rule they're championing has any rationale or if it's just a pure invention? Does it matter how vociferously they object? And on and on. Honestly, I don't believe it's possible to come up with a test to decide which rules to enforce and which to abandon.
Garner gives some first principles in his usage dictionary, but they're all ultimately arbitrary, some of them contradict each other, and they're inconsistently applied. It's a noble effort, but I don't think it works.
This is one reason why I love @MerriamWebster's Dictionary of English Usage so much. It doesn't attempt to declare what's right and wrong. It basically says, "Here's how it's been used, here's what people have said about it, now make up your own mind." It revels in the ambiguity.
I know a lot of editors find that frustrating because they just want to know if they should leave it or change it, but I find that attitude refreshing. It doesn't try to pretend that there are objective answers, because all we really have are people's opinions.
I just want to make it clear that this is absolutely NOT what I'm saying. Language changes, but that doesn't mean it's a downward spiral or that it's becoming lazier, less distinct, or lower class. https://twitter.com/PriscillaPnhks/status/1253062052559548422
I think that, ultimately, it doesn't really matter whether a change arises from ignorance or error. "Therefore" used to mean "for that"; that is, it referred to a noun phrase just as "as such" does. https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/as-such-is-the-new-therefore/ https://twitter.com/martindunphy/status/1253079131085869056
It was the same kind of so-called error that we're seeing with "as such" now. But no one cares about "therefore" because that change happened centuries ago.
