Weird syntax thing alert: There's a particular kind of sentence structure that's been bugging me a lot lately. I think it's an error. But it occurs in generally well-edited publications, and so I'm forced to wonder if I'm wrong. It was raised above the waterline of my conscious awareness by two examples in Michael Weiss's interesting-but-I-think-ultimately-wrongheaded John Hughes retrospective in Slate:
Anyone who grew up in the '80s ... can probably remember high school as much for its unique misery as for the Breakfast Club references it evokes.Is it just me, or is each of these "as much for ... as for ..." constructions back-ass-wards? If you say "as much for X as for Y," aren't you putting the syntactic emphasis on X rather than Y, which I'm pretty sure is not Weiss's intention in either case? The first term should be the surprising one; the second should be the expected one. It's not surprising that you remember high school for its own qualities -- what's surprising is that you remember it because of associations with a John Hughes movie from 1985 -- so the sentences as Weiss writes them sound to my ears like truisms rather than arguments.
Gen X nostalgia is as interesting for what it remembers as for what it chooses to ignore.
If I were Weiss's editor, I would invert each of those sentences, like so:
Anyone who grew up in the '80s can probably remember high school as much for the Breakfast Club references it evokes as for its unique misery.Is this just me? I am asking for real.
Gen X nostalgia is as interesting for what it chooses to ignore as for what it remembers.
