grammaticality - How do I use "as of now" correctly?


Just to clarify, I am not a native English speaker. I occasionally hear from other non-native English speakers the use of the phrase: "As of now" with the meaning of Currently.


Initially I did not understand what they meant and it took me a while to understand that for them saying: "As of now it works like that" in their mind meant "Currently it works like that".


I think that As of now is only used to indicate From now on. The proper phrase they should be using should be As is now. Am I wrong on this?



Answer



Perhaps the people OP hears using as of yesterday/today/tomorrow/now/etc. misunderstand the significance of the as of part. From Cambridge Dictionaries online...



as of/from - starting from a particular time or date:
As of next month, all the airline's fares will be going up.



Anyone with access to a suitable dictionary definition (as is now the case for OP) can see that although anything which is true as of now is also true currently, there's a difference in the strong implications of each form...



as of now = it wasn't true until very recently, but from now on it is/will be true
currently = it won't be true in the [near] future AND (possibly) wasn't true at some point in the past




Offhand, I can think of no context where as is now could directly replace as of now without some other changes to maintain "grammaticality", regardless of the intended meaning.


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