Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

 He was called Big Joe.
 Big Joe, as he was called,...

 He was known as Big Joe.
 Big Joe, as he was known (as?),...

When I was little, I was taught that no one with an ear would say "as
he was known as", and no one with a brain would say "as he was known";
the way out was to retreat to "called".  It is hard, tho, to keep a
slippery little word like "as" in any kind of grammatical cage, and
these days "as he was known" is all I ever see in print.

Now here is someone in the New York Review trying the same trick with
"referred to" & making a mess:

 Soon, however, Israel had its sharpest clash in years with the
 United States over the "delicate subject," as the Israeli press
 continued to refer to the new nuclear reactor.

On first reading this, I took "as" to be a conjunction = "during which
time", and supposed that the references (cryptic or not) continued
into the crisis & perhaps contributed to it.  I didn't see why that
would matter so much, but what do I know about diplomacy?  Then it
dawned on me that what the author actually meant was

 Soon, however, Israel had its sharpest clash in years with the
 United States over the "delicate subject" (which is how the
 Israeli press habitually referred to the new nuclear reactor).

As the press continued to refer to the reactor as, you see.  The
author made the false scent a good deal worse by writing "continued to
refer to" instead of "continually referred to".  At a guess, he first
thought "kept referring to", wanted something more formal, and failed
to notice that "kept" is ambiguous & he had chosen the wrong
translation.