As Maybelle Carter As My Witness
Among the many things that caught my ear during Tuesday’s PBS documentary The Carter Family (that’s country music forebears A.P., Sara, and Maybelle, not peanut farmers Jimmy and Rosalyn) was this use of “as” in an incomplete comparison:
Maybelle, Archival Film: Um, mercy, I never saw as much mail in my life, and everyday of the world we’d get mail from every state in the union and when we left and came home we had over 5,000 letters in a box that came in.
complete transcript
By rule, “as” cannot intensify independently; it must accompany another “as” to identify the point of reference (“I got as much mail as she did”). But what interested me was Maybelle’s use of “as” instead of “so,” which is used all the time in informal speech as an independent intensifier:
“I never saw so much mail.”
“That is so cool.”
Without ogling a corpus, there’s no way to know for sure how rare this choice of “as” was, but it may be notable.
Meanwhile, a stray stimulus caused me to search for the phrase as God as my witness—a misbegotten conflation of “as God is my witness” and “with God as my witness.” Google yields:
about 19,200 for “as God is my witness”
about 4,160 for “as God as my witness”
about 3,640 for “with God as my witness”
I’m still wondering if this was an implied comparison rather than an incomplete comparison: “I never saw as much mail [as I saw] in all my life.” The interpolation is awkward but may be intuitive.
Posted by Nathan Bierma on 05/16 at 08:52 AM
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