as such 'therefore'

[Alice Faber]

Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> On Nov 21, 2005, at 5:21 AM, David Bowie wrote, about consequential
> "as such":
>
>> You mean this usage isn't standard?
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>> David, who was seriously surprised
>
>
> wonderful.  this happens so often that someone should collect
> instances.  usage U is reported.  X observes that U is nonstandard,
> or ungrammatical,  scarcely comprehensible, and probably rare.  and
> Y, who sees nothing odd about U, asks, in effect, "doesn't everyone
> say that?"  crucially, Y is highly educated, a practiced and
> effective speaker and writer, etc.  (in the tale of GoToGo, i was Y,
> by the way.)
>
> the larger point here is that no one, absolutely no one, can know
> *all* the details about what is standard or not in a language.  our
> first experience of variation is just of the existence of variants.
> then our job is to figure out (if we care about such things) which
> variants are associated with specific social groups or contexts and
> are not freely available in the standard.  but this is a task that
> *cannot* be performed perfectly, by real people in real time in real
> situations, and we're likely to guess that some new variants are
> "standard-ok" -- especially with usages that would be likely to be
> infrequent on other grounds (see previous posting in reply to jon
> lighter).
>

I first encountered this phenomenon when my ex-husband (who, as a
teenager, had consciously tried to eradicate all regionalisms associated
with his native Philadelphia from his speech) expressed shock that
"positive anymore" wasn't totally standard. (This would have been in the
mid-70s.)

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber                                    faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                           tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                        fax (203) 865-8963