"As with"

[Jonathan Lighter]

>...so unless you're completely spooked by "like", there's no reason to
avoid (2).

I can't prove it, but such people may exist. I can remember several freshman
themes (admittedly out of thousands) in which perfectly correct
prepositional _like_ was replaced with awkward-sounding and uncalled-for
_as_.

That was twenty and more years ago, which only means that the practice,
limited though it may be, has had plenty of time to spread.  My guess is
that it is more likely to be spreading than retreating.

I'm not saying that people who write "as with" are necessarily "spooked by
'like.'"  Merely that the phrase may gained ground through the agency of
people who are.

Assuming they exist.

JL
On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "As with"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Aug 9, 2011, at 3:22 PM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:
>
> > Didn't Winston cigarettes kill "like" when it make a big deal of
> > changing from "like a cigarette should" to "as a cigarette should"?
>
> i understood Jon Lighter's
>
> > What happened to "like"? That would work fine in the Lucinda Childs ex.
> >
> > Is "as with" partly the result of "like" avoidance?
>
> to be comparing
>  (1) As with many ..., Lucinda Childs ...
> and
>  (2) Like many ..., Lucinda Childs ...
>
> but no one objects to "like" + NP, so unless you're completely spooked by
> "like", there's no reason to avoid (2).
>
> but maybe Jon was thinking of
>  (3) Like with many ..., Lucinda Childs
> which has "like" + PP, which not everyone is comfortable with.
>
> the famous Winston example originally had "like" + Clause, which is widely
> proscribed (see the discussion in MWDEU) -- indeed, that was the point of
> the ad ("What do you want, good grammar or good taste?").  but, in any
> case,"like" + Clause is irrelevant to the current discussion.
>
> "as with" makes a comparison, but it does more than that; (1) and (2)
> aren't discourse-equivalent.  as Jerry Cohen pointed out, "as with" in (1)
> is roughly discourse-equivalent to "as is the case with" (or "as is true
> for" and probably some other possibilities).  it frames the material that
> follows as well as drawing a comparison.
>
> Megan alluded to examples that aren't so straightforwardly acceptable and
> interpretable as the Lucinda Childs example.  there are lots of them.  and
> there are many unproblematic examples that don't easily allow "like" for "as
> with" -- for instance, from Language Log postings:
>
>  As with email-borne spam, much of the text of splogs is randomly
> generated, or at least generated according to a set of esoteric rules known
> only to the splogger.
>
>  [quoted] If, as with so many of the trends of American Hispanics,
> Spanglish were to spread to Latin America, it would constitute the ultimate
> imperialistic takeover, the final imposition of a way of life that is
> economically dominant but not culturally superior in any sense.
>
>  As with Fitzmas, it looks like there were multiple discoverers of this
> felicitous blend.
>
>  [quoted] There are, as with other inversions, many reasons for turning to
> the passive ...
>
> sentence-initial "like" + NP is a SPAR (a Subjectless Predicational Adjunct
> Requiring a referent for the missing subject), but the conditions on "as
> with" + NP are looser than this.
>
> arnold
>
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