As best as...

[Mullins, Bill]

Probably related to "as far as".  I use (I believe) "as best as I can
tell" and "as best as I know" as replacements for "as far as I can tell"
and "as far as I know".

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society
> [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Arnold M. Zwicky
> Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 11:24 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: As best as...
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: As best as...
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------------
>
> 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)
>