Where does the expression in and among itself come from? Is it only used for emphasis compared to in itself?
For example,
This would be interesting in and among itself.
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The usual expression is In and of itself, used for emphasis, so the expression in your question seems unusual.
Could it be a deliberate mistake? We need to know the context.
For example, it seems ungrammatical to say among itself since 'among' implies more than one member of a group -- but does 'itself' refer to a group?
Context would help ....
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I've heard it in the context "This would be interesting in and among itself". It could be a mistake, but it seems it's quite common, I get a few thousand hits on Google. – 719016 Jul 20 '11 at 10:36
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Google search results for this bring up a lot of instances where it seems that it is a corrupted form of in and of itself and I think this is the case in the example given by the asker of this question.
In and of itself is just an emphatic form of in itself, meaning:
apart from any connexion with or relation to others; absolutely
The expression in and among itself, although rare in published works (9 hits on google books), can have a distinct meaning of its own. For example:
Unstoppable, it shoved us toward that mass of steel ribbon that curled around and around in and among itself like a gigantically long finely sharpened double-edged sword.
Here it means something like convoluted.
