Be that as it will
My friend Steven Levine collects stuff from garage sales, estate sales,
and the like, and passes them along to his friends. My most
recent gift from Steven is a 1915 Funk & Wagnalls booklet
(only 80 small pages)
Faulty Diction,
which I expect to be mining for material for some time. Here's an
entry for a proscription that was new to me (p. 18):
be
that as it will. Erroneously substituted for be that as it may.
Consonant with this judgment is the fact that both the
Cambridge International Dictionary of
Idioms (1998) and the
Cambridge
Dictionary of American Idioms (2003) list
be that as it may but not
be that as it will (or the other
variants
be this as it may/will).
Meanwhile, hoi polloi on the web use all four variants with very
similar frequencies:
be that as it may:
387,000 be that as it will: 267,000
be this as it may: 160,000 be this as it will: 160,000
These numbers are not gigantic, which is not surprising, since
be that as it may is formal in
style, and Google web searches turn up a lot of (very) informal
writing. So I suppose it could be claimed that what the web
searches show is that ordinary people have an imperfect command of
formal idioms. Against this is the fact that a lot of the
be that as it will cites are from
thoroughly respectable sources:
"Well," cries Jones, "be that as it
will, it shall be your own fault, as I have promised you, if you ever
hear any more of this adventure. Behave kindly to the girl, and I will
never open my lips concerning the matter to any one." [Henry
Fielding, Tom Jones]
But be that as it will, the world shall, for once, hear what account an
Englishman shall give of Scotland, who has had occasion to see most of
it, and to make critical enquiries into what he has not seen ...
[Daniel Defoe, Introduction to the
Account and Description of Scotland]
But, be that as it will, this is certain, that whoever pursues his own
thoughts, will find them sometimes launch out beyond the extent of
body, into the infinity of space or expansion ... [John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding]
... Be that as it will, in general I dislike very much the Venetian
School and prefer the Flemish to it in its own way, that is to say with
an exception to the finest works of Titian, of which the Danae at
Naples, I think, is the most pleasing picture in Italy and consequently
in the world. [Lord Holland, letter from Florence, 5 August 1794]
Now I see that
be that as it might
gets 250,000 hits and
be this as it
might 128,000, with many from reputable sources.
So what's the source of the judgment that there is only one correct
variant? (Plenty of idioms have variant forms, after all:
be/lie at the bottom of something,
time hangs/lies heavy (
on someone's hands),
lay/put your cards on the table,
have/hold all the cards,
etc.) And that this is the variant with
may rather than
will or
might (not to mention
that rather than
this)? (I find all of the
variants unremarkable.) These are serious questions for the
F&W booklet, since it claims to be based on "scientific
principles", in particular the principle that
Usage to be good should be reputable, that is, it should have
the sanction of good authors or (to be the best usage) of the best
authors. (p. 4)
What's more, the offenses in the booklet are supposed to be serious
ones:
The faulty expressions treated are
comparatively few, since rigid principles of exclusion have been
enforced by the limitations of space. ... The examples given are
sufficient to illustrate the various classes of faulty usage that need
to be guarded against. (p. 3)
(It should be obvious that the
Faulty
Diction people were not proponents of Avoid Passive, or of
avoiding "passive style", and indeed the booklet -- published three
years before Strunk's
Elements of
Style, with its famous antipathy towards the passive voice and
passive style -- doesn't warn against either.)
Now I very much doubt that in this case (and in many others) the
compilers of the booklet actually consulted the practice of good
authors. The judgment looks to me like an expression of personal
taste, a quirk even. Not that there's anything wrong with
expressing personal tastes in print -- but this sort of booklet is not
the place to display them.
At the moment, I have no idea what the practice of good authors was
then or is now, and I'm not prepared to do the necessary searches with
the resources available to me and in the time available to me. It
might be that the
will
variant was current in the 18th century but dipped in use by good
authors in the 19th, though for the entry to occur in
Faulty Diction it must have been
fairly frequent a hundred years ago. But I'm inclined to
think that the compilers of the booklet just pulled the proscription
out of the air.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 24, 2007 08:48 PM