“As” often links two statements that embody a comparison. A common example follows the structure, “I am as intelligent as you”. This form has begun to invade a completely different construction, of the type, “Much as I should like to come, I’m afraid I am otherwise engaged.”
Now, the first “as” from the other idiom can be found in sentences that do not require it: “As painful as the David Blaine endurance ordeal must be for him …” (Daily Telegraph leader, 15 September 2003). Until recently the sentence would probably have run “Painful as the David Blaine endurance ordeal must be …”.
“To begin with, as hard as it may be for a supermarket-jaded city dweller to believe, ‘stone age’ hunter-gatherers are erudite botanists …” (Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, 1994, Penguin ed. p. 421). Pinker writes well, if colloquially, and only irritates when deploying obvious Americanisms (like “around and around”). I am fairly sure that the redundant usage comes from America, where confusion between constructions is commonplace. Odd, though, that it has established itself, like a Japanese weed, so rapidly in our higher journalism.
But this construction appears to have evolved in the nineteenth century. I find an example of “as … as” in this sense dating from 1740: “As high as my expectation was raised, I confess, the magnificence of the city infinitely surpasses it” (Thomas Gray writing to his mother from Rome, 2 April 1740). And John Wesley’s Dictionary (1753) has a preliminary “Note to the reader” that begins: “As incredible as it may appear, I must avow, that this dictionary is not published to get money …”. I would maintain that during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were two distinct constructions, used in different contexts. [Pinker himself discounts the authority of 18th-century usage when a more modern one has become established; see Modern Malapropisms: uninterested/disinterested, below.]
Nevertheless, I find the following sentence more confusing than it would have been without the first “as”: “The real problem is not rebel judges – as liberal as many of them undoubtedly are – but judges sticking too faithfully to flawed ministerial instruction.” (Spectator, 17 June 2006).
“Mind Your Language”, Spectator, 2 December 2006, deals with this question, concluding: “I cannot believe our own age is suddenly leaping back to a construction that includes the antecedent as, since it disappeared two and a half centuries ago. I rather think we are seeing today the confused carrying over into the concessive construction [of] the ordinary comparative construction ‘as bright as gold'”. Just as I said.
“As” is involved in another case of redundancy: “Equally as” is often used instead of “as” simply: “Among names for girls, Samantha is equally as common as Sharon.” “Equally” can and should be omitted.
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