A friend of mine just posted this status on Facebook:
Decisions, decisions – schoolwork…watch olympics….schoolwork…watch olympics……?? Olympics is so going to win this dilemma haha especially SEEMS the gymnastics is on later!
I said surely she meant seeing as, not seems, (she's used this word in a similar way before). She replied:
'seems' is also grammatically correct – it is a synonym for 'because.' And 'seeing as' is actually an idiom and is no longer the preferred phraseology
Is she right?
Best Answer
Your friend is making two assertions; one seems unsubstantiated, and the other seems tenuous:
The first assertion should be easily verifiable using a dictionary. However, after checking several on-line dictionaries, even the OED, I was unable to find any evidence that 'seems' could be used as a conjunction, or that the word 'seems' has some secondary or tertiary meaning along the lines of 'for the reason that'. Perhaps she was confusing 'since' with 'seems', since 'since' can be used that way.
As for assertion #2, it's hard to tell what "preferred phraseology" means; however, I did find one dictionary that mentioned 'seeing as' is a more informal form of 'seeing that'. And, using Google's Ngrams to look at the trend line, you can see that 'seeing that' is more often used than 'seeing as' – but there's no evidence that the phrase is falling out of favor (in fact, it seems to be trending upward since 1990). Perhaps more significantly, no instances of 'especially seems the' were found.
I would say that you are right, and she is wrong – but I'd avoid gloating, especially if you wanted to remain friends.