pet peeve watch: 'as well as'

[xela]

I was just reading the about page for Tiny Showcase, a website with what seems to be a really cool premise: They make high-quality small-format limited edition prints of original artwork and sell them via the net for far less than you'd pay for pretty much any other original art work. Their artist friends get some exposure and some money; part of the proceeds also go to a charity of the artist's choice, and the customer gets something ... well, not quite unique, but certainly unusual.

So there I was, thinking about posting about the site, when I was distracted by this sentence:

This raises the print price slightly, but now the artist, as well as their favorite charity, benefit from each piece sold.

(Yes, even a scrawny, mangy kitten can sometimes trigger my Look! a kitten! reflex.)

How do you read that sentence? What's the status quo ante? Before the event that raised prices slightly, who, the artists or the charities, was benefitting from sales, and who was not? Am I the only one who's bugged when someone places the objects on either side of as well as in the wrong order? Or perhaps am I the only one who thinks there is an order: does the rest of the world think as well as is commutative?

To me, the entire purpose of that idiom is to assert that the novel or unexpected works as well as the established or expected. People only seem to have trouble understanding this with the as well as idiom, not with the general case of as <property> as. Consider

• Tom is as strong as an ox.
• His eyes are as green as a fresh pickled toad.
• Bill Gates as rich as Croesus.

Now consider their inverses:

• An ox is as strong as Tom.
• A fresh pickled toad is as green as his eyes.
• Croesus is as rich as Bill Gates.

You might use any of those phrases ironically, but they are not equivalent to the preceding set. The insurgent encroaches upon the entrenched, the novel upon the established  — not the other way around.

</flame>

Comments

[kareila]

Although I see your point and agree, the big neon flashing danger sign on that sentence is the lack of proper subject-verb agreement.

It should read either:

"the artist, as well as their favorite charity, benefits" (or the reverse, as you say)

Or:

"the artist and their favorite charity benefit"

That still ignores the problem of the colloquial "their" as generic possessive pronoun, but to get into that would be to rewrite it completely.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

To me, this usage of "as well as" is interchangeable with "in addition to". So I'd interpret the sentence to mean that in the past, only the charity benefited from each sale, but now, because of the price increase, the artist does too. That might not be exactly what they meant to write. But whether it's a good phrase, or has anything to do with relative wellness, never occurred to me. It's just an idiom that my brain translates without effort.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

You prove my point: What they wanted to convey is that in the past only the artist benefited; now the artist and a charity benefit; you read it as saying the opposite. The fact that "as well as" means much the same thing as "in addition to" is why the order of their arguments to it was wrong.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wasn't even going to go there. English is trying to sort out the lack of a non-gendered third person singular, and it looks like "they" is going to be the approach we end up with. Verb agreement is going to suffer some along the way. I expect in fifty years or so a new edition of Strunk & White will teach that they, their, andtheirs are the correct third person singular pronouns when talking about a person, as well as their traditional third person plural roles. Along with a whole set of rules for when to use is or was with them, and when are or were.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I think I got there by a different path, not at all related to the "as <property> as" general case...