In as regarding as to
A rare entry in the “grammar police” category, though it’s really more a case of frustration than disdain over “creative” langauge use.
The noun and verb regard and the preposition (say) regarding all have to do with topicality, i.e., having-to-do-with-something-ness. They like to appear with prepositions like as, in, and with For instance,
- My letter regards the recent events in northern Canada. (main verb)
- I now present several opinions as regards Canadian politics. (finite verb with as, fills topic role of opinion)
- It seems like no one has any awareness as regarding the importance of bilingual education. (-ing verb with as, fills topic role of awareness)
- Will she surpass her father with regard to success in the business world? (noun with with, fills domain role of surpass)
- Does anyone have thoughts in regards to the recent Canadian election? (plural noun with in, fills topic role of thoughts; yes, I think this construction is a bit odd)
- Antitrust laws unaffected as regards to other activities of professional sports contests.
- Fortunately, I actually knew what we were doing with regarding to synchronization and that we would be developing a compelling product with that strategy.
- In regards with the current developments in Lebanon, Austrian Airlines is cancelling flights to Beirut until further notice.
- Works well with clerks in answering questions in regarding to reports explains laws.
- As regarding to RCA plugs,I have used SME, Kimber, Neotech, Eichmann, Shark, Monster, Audio Techica, WBT, LAT, Neutrik and many more
…and many more. The above are just taken from strings that get tens or hundreds of thousands of hits (except the last, which gets only several hundred). There are many more possibilities, including as regarding as and with regarded to which get dozens or even hundreds. What’s a poor lexicographer to do?
This reminds me of yet another apparant lust for combining morphemes in strange ways that I observed about a year ago: the evolution of login and logon into some pretty strange things. Some numbers from Google:
logined: 15688 (including loginned, loggined, logginned) logoned: 236 matches (including logonned, loggoned, loggonned)
login(ed) + in: 781000 + 788 matches (second number is with past tense forms) login + on: 864 + 180 login + into: 276000 + 204 login + onto: 4010 + 1
logon(ed) + in: 20000 + 2 matches logon + on: 23400 + 10 logon + into: 5370 + 11 logon + onto: 626 + 11
A lot of these are legitimate (”automatic login in Windows”). A search of “to logon in|to|…” would guarantee many more verb hits.
Many of the +into cases seem to be talking about logging into some special state of the system, like “logon into slave node,” “logon into a Windows NT/2000 client alone,” “logon into that user’s account.”
I just got an email that said “the agreement in regards to….” Since, for various cultural and educational reasons, there is so much being written on the web and in email that is not traditional usage (at least I always thought so), is it the job of the lexicographer to legitimize all that by trying to incorporate it into the language, or is there still some role for “correct” grammar?
There are two extremes: “everything is correct” and “nothing is relevant”. The first says that whatever people say is “correct” and should be legitimate, and the latter says that there is some absolute (and somehow unchanging) set of rules for a language, and no matter what people say, those rules are the authority.
In reality, neither is correct, or useful for analyzing language. In a case like regard as a verb or as a noun, and with various prepositions, I think there are several combinations that conform to most people’s idea of “correct” English, and several combinations that may be common in certain dialects, social groups, or even individuals.
When you are dealing with something like the internet, though, there is the problem of many anonymous authors and lots of genuine mistakes (typos or “thinkos”). That is, there could well be several common combinations involving regard which, if you ask the author to look back over their speech, they might say, “oh, now that sounds wrong to me.” On the other hand, there may be dialects or social groups, or just plain individuals, who really think something like “with regarding to” is correct. But unless you actually go out and find the person and observe how they usually use the phrase, you can’t really tell if a single instance is a “mistake” or if they really think it’s correct. But if they do think it’s correct, there’s no way to discount it.
A useful proxy for seeing if people really are just making mistakes is to see how often they occur. If you get tens or hundreds of thousands of hits on google, it’s probably legitimate, if non-standard. If you only get a few hundred, you could probably wave it off as a commonly-made genuine mistake (or, you can notice the domain names of the websites, to see if they are from non-English speaking nations; some sorts of very common errors, getting hundreds of hits, will only occur on, say, sites hosted in Germany or Russia).