As best as...

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 8, 2005, at 7:37 AM, Alison Murie wrote:

> "As best" is an odd enough idiom, but "as best as" is beyond odd,
> to my ear
> (though heard often enough).  I wonder if the existence of the word
> /asbestos/ has somehow contributed to it....?

very unlikely that "asbestos" had anything to do with it.

i have no idea what the history is here -- i don't find "as best" (in
the relevant usage) in the OED Online, but maybe i just didn't look
in the right places -- but i find "as best as" just fine in most of
the examples i looked at after i googled on "as best as" (there are
hundreds of thousands of hits), and plain "as best" only marginal (it
strikes me as dated).

granted that "as best" and "as best as" are both idiomatic, it would
be hard to choose between them on semantic grounds.  in fact, "as
best as" has the virtue of conforming syntactically to other uses of
"as" + Adj, while things like "as best I can see" are syntactically
rather odd.

query: do people who like "as best I can see" (without the matching
"as") also accept a version with an explicit complementizer: "as best
that I can see"?

in any case, "as best as" + Clause could have developed from "as best
" + Clause by filling in a matching "as", or the second could have
developed from the first by abbreviation.  or the second could have
been a blend of "as best as" + Clause and "the best" + Clause (as in
"the best I can see").  undoubtedly other scenarios could be
imagined.  but are there any actual data on the history of these
expressions and on their distribution (geographical, social,
stylistic, whatever)?

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)