Talk:insofar

I am bothered by the "adverb" designation/analysis; Fowler has it as "compound preposition", which I prefer at least as an optional diagnosis. JonRichfield (talk) 13:02, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

Dated advice



 * If you have better advice for a quotation then by all means use it, or even completely value-free text, but the quotation you removed is no worse than say, Shakespearian quotes that are a great deal more dated. The Fowler quote is far better than the current quotation, which is rather grotty as it stands. Its quote's content is not part of the definition, but an excellent example of usage. JonRichfield (talk) 17:16, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Non-expert analysis: The sentence part of the above quote could be fine, but I would imagine that it should be included on the insofar as page instead of this page (excuse me if I am not understanding some part of this). An 'old' prescriptive rule that has enough authority could be written up as a usage note that explains the informal and more formal usages. Second, I would say that the tone here is a little hostile- don't worry about it if any edit gets reverted. Rather than a vociferous defense, a cordial conversation is all that is needed. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:48, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * As soon as someone gets the bibliographic detail for the Times citation, it can provide some more support for insofar as, but not for the independent existence of insofar. DCDuring (talk) 22:53, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

RFV discussion: February–March 2021
We have an entry for insofar as. We do not have any evidence for the existence of insofar, spelled solid, outside of that idiom. If it exists it would be nice to know when it was in use. The OED may provide clues. DCDuring (talk) 22:56, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Plenty of results on google/google books for "insofar there is", which seems to be an ellipsis of "insofar as there is". If you search for "insofar *" on the ngram viewer, it will show you a few of the most frequent tokens that follow it in the corpus. Colin M (talk) 23:58, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
 * A large number of the usages are spurious due to insertion of adverbials and other phrases, eg, "insofar, at least, as", "insofar, that is, as", "insofar only as", "If I am only insofar a moral person as I am a Kantian or Aristotelian", "insofar (and only insofar) as", etc. Of the balance, many seem to be by non-native speakers, or scannos, speaking errors, typesetting errors, etc. DCDuring (talk) 14:45, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
 * From all of this I conclude that the most likely outcome of this RfV is that the only definition of insofar is "insofar as". The question remains whether the as-less use is or error. BTW, that would make the PoS "Conjunction". DCDuring (talk) 15:06, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
 * OED's 3 earliest quotations for insofar are all without "as", the latest being:
 * "(1849, G.Grote) Insofar the latter had good reason to complain." Colin M (talk) 20:57, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
 * It would still be nice if we had our own evidence. From the one cite we have the OED's cite, the definition would seem to be "insofar as" in current English. We have to make sure we've broken circularity at [[insofar as]]. DCDuring (talk) 18:16, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

cited Kiwima (talk) 23:24, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

RFV-passed Kiwima (talk) 22:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)