| 词组 | as of |
| 释义 | as of It is a bit surprising how often you scratch a disapproved locution and find an Americanism that some British commentator has castigated. As of appears to be such a one: • Let me now turn to the strange American delusion that the words "as of can always be used before a date as if they were a temporal preposition An additional illiteracy is introduced when the words "as of precede not a date, but the adverb "now." "As of now" is a barbarism which only a love of illiteracy for its own sake can explain. What is generally meant is "at present." —Lord Conesford, Saturday Evening Post, 13 July 1957 American commentators soon appeared in support of Lord Conesford's view: Copperud 1964, Flesch 1964, Follett 1966, Nickles 1974, Barzun 1985, and newspaper columnist Sally Bright in September 1986. The first thing we must point out about as of"is that even Lord Conesford and Barzun recognize that it has a legitimate use—"restricted," Barzun calls it. It is used when something in a letter or other writing carries a different date than that of the document itself. • Statistics as of June 30, 1943 —Britannica Book of the Year 1944 • The tractors, said he, were costing Ford more to make than Ferguson paid for them. So Breech ended the contract, as of June 30 —Time, 21 July 1947 • This article was written and published by the Center in 1957. In the present version I have revised the figures as of the end of 1967 —Adolf A. Berle, Center Mag., January 1969 The function of as of in these examples was explained by a Merriam editor in 1939 as "indicating an arbitrary, often officiai, designation for record or convenience "Another aspect of the arbitrariness underlined by as of "is that the date given may not be precisely accurate: a heading such as "Balance as of August 31" may mean no more than "Balance at the end of business in the month of August" since the 31st may fall on a Sunday or some other day when the business is closed. This use of as of need never be avoided; it constitutes the bulk of our printed evidence for the phrase. You should be aware that most of our evidence comes from business sources—annual reports and such—and from reference sources—Current Biography, Britannica Book of the Year, etc.—with occasional evidence from the news media. There is another use, chiefly oral, of as of. In this use as of occurs with words relating to time other than dates; these words include the adverb now mentioned by Lord Conesford. Some examples: • ... an almost morbid resemblance to the Roosevelt-Landon figures as of about this time in 1936 —Elmo Roper, quoted in Time, 13 Sept. 1948 • Santayana's The Last Puritan, of a wider range, ends as of a period two decades earlier than the other two —Lucian Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, 1954 • I am saying, as of now anyway, that Ross never knew of Fleischmann's offer of his job to you —James Thurber, letter, 7 Aug. 1958 • Dr. Edward Teller announced that "the best scientists as of this moment are not in the United States but in Moscow." —Current Biography, November 1964 Notwithstanding Lord Conesford's easy generalization, Roper and Whitehead and Thurber and Teller are not showing a love of illiteracy for its own sake—they are simply using an ordinary idiom. The idiom seems to be American, but Whitehead was an Englishman— maybe he picked it up while he was at Harvard. Brief idioms like as of, made up usually of particles, regularly serve two purposes in the language: they serve as spacers between the context words, and they give the mouth something to do while the brain races to keep ahead. It is true that they often add little to written discourse. It is equally true that there is no reason to try to expunge all traces of speech patterns from your writing, unless special circumstances compel you to write very compactly. |
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