>> Is it "Use them as IS" or "Use them as ARE" ??

[Colette D Marine]

In article <77...@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> v056...@ubvmsa.cc.buffalo.edu
wants to know which is correct.

Well, technically, you'd want to say "use them as they are", but, I
believe the 'active ingredient' in this phrase is the widely-used-
together subphrase, "as is". The two words sort of travel together
through common usage and, as such, form an inseperable unit which
conveys the appropriate meaning just fine.

col...@casbah.acns.nwu.edu

[Paul D. Crowley]

Is there a name for phrases that get used as if they were a single,
undecomposable syntactic unit? Phrases like "as is" as in "These
programs are provided as is" or "For fuck's sake" (this doesn't make any
sense if you try and give it a literal meaning, so the only sensible way
to deal with it is to treat it as "For~fuck's~sake": ie you can't say
"For the sake of fuck")

Or foreign language phrases like "in loco parentis" - it would be a
nonsense to attempt to treat this as three separate words rather than as
an indivisable adverb with two \0x20 characters in it.

Any ideas?
____
\/ o\ Paul Crowley ai...@castle.ed.ac.uk \ /
/\__/ Part straight. Part gay. All queer. \/

[John P Weiksnar]

I'd like to know.

--
John P. Weiksnar v056...@ubvmsa.cc.buffalo.edu

[Roger Lustig]

In article <77...@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> v056...@ubvmsa.cc.buffalo.edu writes:

> I'd like to know.

Well, try it for a while. Say "as are" to some people. See if they
understand you. The correct construction is the one that gets you the
fewest dumb looks.

(Yes, that's a general rule.)

Roger

[Roger Lustig]

In article <1991May23.2...@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> col...@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Colette D Marine) writes:

Right. The technical term is "idiom." "As-is" is an idiom; as such, it
obeys its own usage, and not the grammatical rules that the words
individually might be subject to.

Roger