As much as we don't understand

It's Radio Times again. One can understand that the Editor might want to commission articles from people with useful things to say even though their command of the English language may be dodgy, but we would assume that one of the roles of an editor is tactfully to eliminate solecisms or mixed-up grammar from their contributions.

"As much as you feel that H------ isn't entirely at ease under the scrutiny that her job entails, there's equally a sense that she's forged her sense of self under such duress."

This falsely conceived 'as-much-as' construction has shoved its clumsy way into all sorts of journalism in recent years, causing severe collateral damage. Grammar and syntax, coherence and logic become infected.

The falsity consists in confusion between two standard idioms.

The sequence 'as . . . . as' was formerly used to indicate simile: 'as thin as a rake', 'as bold as brass'. So we may use the phrase, 'as much as' to indicate similarity (or identity) of quantity: 'as much as the tank will hold', or 'as much as you can eat at a sitting'. These phrases are closely akin to 'as many as' ('as many as you have room for', or 'as many as you like').

But that idiom is quite different from the "Much as I respect your knowledge, I can't say I agree with your opinions" kind of construction, which implies not similarity or identity, but contrast. Here we are saying "Although I respect, yet I disagree"; or "I do respect, but I disagree".

The passage I have quoted above from RT is garbled. The writer appears at first to imply both ideas at once, both similarity and contrast. The unexpected additional adverb 'equally' seems intended to stress similarity or identity. But if we read the sentence through and think carefully, we can see that 'equality' is not what the writer means to express so much as 'simultaneity'.

OK, we can more or less see what the writer means, but we understand in spite of what he or she has actually written. The writer's point would have been clearer if the 'As much as' phrase had been abandoned and replaced by the single word 'If '.

As much as we don't understand