03-18-2012, 08:38 AM
'Awesome as', I think, is merely a superlative = very awesome, so you would say that 'as' is an adverb.
The changing nature of Grammar does not worry me. I know linguists whose job it is to go to some unknown place, live with the people, work out how the language goes, and describe it- after which, the natives, if they wished, could use his work as a prescriptive Grammar. Then people could start breaking the rules, until a new up-to-date, modern Grammar was produced by a native with a beard and sandals.
It is my good fortune that I do not need to turn to these books: if I say something, it may be wrong, but how I say it, determines what is right.
On the much more interesting point about figures of speech, and when to choose a metaphor, and when a simile, I suggest that there is an important difference. If one says that something is like something else, it must, in some way or other, actually be so. It is possible to get a comparison from Burns 'love is like a red red rose' : it may be fresh and new, and beautiful, as a rose rose just coming out in June is. En revanche, 'unleashing the dogs of war', just means, there's going to be some heavy shit going down. I don't know what it canine about war. Dogs can hurt you, so can spears and arrows. It is a fine metaphor, but a little further away than was the love and the rose. I have never understood where the idea that there ought to be a blanket ban on simile came from. I assume that underlying it is the concept that no word should be there, without being needed, and that 'like' is prolix. That would be a cheek, as I have an exclusive franchise on prolixity.
