Does anybody have an explanatory link?

[conuly]

So, responses here are not terribly helpful.

The OP is specifically confused about the use of the prhase "such as" in the highlighted sentence. I said that this is not wrong, it's just formal and old-fashioned, but like most Americans I've had very little formal education in English grammar and with google I still can't find either the words to define it or a few well-placed citations by prestigious authors.

Comments

[ethelmay]

Your instincts are quite correct. Looking in the advanced Google Books search for "such as" before 1900, I see a lot of "such as" to mean "those that" or "those who." E.g., Migratory Birds; or such as visit Britain at different seasons of the year. This author was also fond of the construction: The Flowers of History, Especially Such as Relate to the Affairs of Britain: A.D. 1066 to A.D. 1307By Matthew Paris · 1853 If you think of "such" as a pronoun (see https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/such) it makes more sense.

I think part of the problem is that the old-fashioned use is clashing with the modern one because in a sense both are appropriate here: you actually want "such as" (modern) AND "such as" (old-fashioned) at the same time. You can't actually put just "those that" in place of the "such as" and have it make sense, the way you can with my examples above. You'd need to say "such as those that." So I think the modern author knows both uses, but is conflating them in a way that doesn't quite work.

[conuly]

Do you mind if I copy this comment over as is?

[ethelmay]

Go ahead, I guess. I am not positive that I am right about the last point, but I think it's a good hypothesis.

[reynardo]

The "such as" is fine for me. My issue is the "open and close our sentences." I think the author meant to say "open and closed sentences", using "open" and "closed" as adjectives for the word "sentence", but didn't quite know what the expression is. (Maybe they just heard it without understanding it?). Thus they used "close" instead, then ran it through a SPAG checker. The checker, seeing "close" and thinking of it as a verb, thought that therefore the word "sentences" needed a qualifier and suggested "our".

So I don't think this was written by an AI, but I think it *was* written by someone who was grabbing expressions without quite understanding what they meant.

I have no issue with "such as", but then I am an older (*cough*I remember the 1960s*cough*) person who also was brought up on very British books and writing.

[ethelmay]

The author writes a column discussing one sentence by an author. "Our sentence" means the one currently under discussion, in this case by George Eliot.

[conuly]

Whoops, I see you're talking about the book excerpt.

[gwydion]

I don't see anything missing or wrong with the sentence.

[sovay]

I said that this is not wrong, it's just formal and old-fashioned

Agreed that it's not wrong: the usage looks identical to me to the grammar of "such as can be found in any participating establishment," etc.