Possibly-interesting comparison: in Japanese, the way to talk about trying to do some verb-phrase X, is "Xて見る" — which is usually literally translated as "we'll try [X]ing", but which breaks down into "[verb-phrase X in present tense] [the verb "to see" in whatever tense you mean.]"
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
jp0001 · 2h ago
Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
gwd · 1h ago
> I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
LudwigNagasena · 7m ago
> If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
What if two non-native speakers say something and understand each other?
ricardobeat · 1m ago
Then they’re having a useful, but not grammatically correct, conversation.
ecocentrik · 30m ago
Dr Dre is a professional poet and a very successful one by any standard. His whole stock and trade was American urban colloquialisms most of which can be traced back to English rural and working class and predate the colonization of the Americas. The early development of English "prestige grammar" and word usage dates back to the court of William the Conqueror and the reintroduction of romance linguistic influence on Anglo-Saxon English that lead to the development of Middle English by the 13th Century. What you understand as English "prestige grammar" today is a moving target, consistently evolving but still full of contradictions and single-case rules. Many popular European languages today have been modified to exclude these linguistic anomalies, making them more consistent, less error prone and easier to learn. I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554)
> 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
umanwizard · 38m ago
Nobody has ever used “literally” to mean “figuratively”. That’s a common misconception and/or a strawman from people who want to stick to the original meaning of “literally”.
If that were the meaning, you would be able to say things like “I stubbed my toe and it hurts so bad I’m figuratively dying”, mirroring the colloquial meaning of “literally”. But nobody says this.
Oh, and by the way, the “traditional” meaning isn’t even the first one. According to my OED second edition, “literal” meaning “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” is only attested since 1599.
The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
strken · 1h ago
> If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct.
In their dialect, sure. In any given dialect, who knows?
Any speaker of a dialect that isn't West Coast American has likely watched actors who live in Los Angeles try, and fail, to speak their dialect.
umanwizard · 30m ago
Of course. Just like what I’m writing now isn’t grammatically correct Spanish or Chinese.
cgriswald · 1h ago
Although it is a little odd and I'm not certain I've seen it in writing, I have definitely heard constructions like "John will both try and kill mosquitos." to mean, "John will both attempt to and succeed in kill[ing] mosquitos."
"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.
Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)
Included for no real reason:
"They tried and failed, all of them?"
"Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
amenhotep · 41m ago
These are all just different constructions that are related to "try and" only by coincidence. The fact that a different construction looks similar to a grammatically incoherent one by coincidence doesn't make the incoherent one coherent.
mikepurvis · 29m ago
I disagree. GP is laying is laying out reasonable scenarios that are a few dropped/implied words away from the otherwise incoherent ones. For my part, this one is very grating to my ears:
"Try and tell the truth"
Since it clearly should be "try to tell the truth"
However this one, while similar in construction, doesn't actually sound nearly as bad:
"Try and finish the assignment"
It can be fixed the same way ("try to finish") but it also accept GP's form too, which would be "try (to work hard) and (see if you can) finish the assignment". As I say, for whatever reason this second example sounds much more reasonable to me— I think at least in part my brain is much more accepting of a word that feels dropped than one that's misused.
csande17 · 1m ago
[delayed]
phkahler · 22m ago
>> but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
Can we have also declare war on using "exponentially" in place of "significantly"?
Quekid5 · 12m ago
Interesting use of "declare war" there... :)
I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)
Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
>Try always and tell the truth
I think the article is incorrect on this though, try always and tell the truth is a perfectly fine albeit slightly anachronistic usage that would mean
Whatever you do you must always try (that is to say not give up), and tell the truth.
One might also assume that you should tell the truth about trying always is the meaning, but at any rate it is not a phrasing that would be out of order a few hundred years ago.
leeoniya · 1h ago
> but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
In that context, 'literally' as figuratively makes the same sense as inflammable and flammable.
It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.
My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.
The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.
Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.
Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.
cgriswald · 53m ago
The problem with "one spelling the way it is said" is that (1) pronunciation varies among native speakers even within the same country or region. (So, at best, you'd have to pick a winner or just count them all as different languages with their own spellings.) (2) Pronunciation drifts over time (and I'm not sure an official spelling and pronunciation could stop it).
umanwizard · 24m ago
The other reason is that there are many countries that speak English, and the largest and most powerful one is too politically dysfunctional to ever agree on something that would be this controversial.
wingspar · 39m ago
How would that work for wood?
aswanson · 39m ago
Irregardless of this, what's your take on irregardless?
bjackman · 1h ago
Yep "correctness" only exists contextually. A language teacher can say "no that's wrong" with the implied meaning of "that doesnt follow the patterns of the dialect I'm teaching you". Ditto for newspaper editors and their house style.
But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.
In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.
(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
Swizec · 1h ago
> Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".
Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.
Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.
You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
umanwizard · 21m ago
> In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling.
Same is true in the US, though ethnicity is in the mix too. White and black Americans are historically distinct cultural groups which speak different dialects (though obviously, since the end of slavery and segregation the groups are mixing more and more). It is no coincidence that varieties spoken by white people ended up as the “standard”.
da_chicken · 47m ago
I've thought a lot about this one. It really is the message that matters, not the grammar. It's the song, not the notes.
It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.
Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.
Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.
jfengel · 1h ago
As far as grammar is concerned, yes, that's true.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
lblume · 47m ago
I fail to imagine how one could use "try and" in a resume, without actively trying to.
physarum_salad · 1h ago
Yes and constantly obstructing communication is annoying and boring!
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
tux1968 · 1h ago
> Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
Ellipses are properly written as three dots.
mikewarot · 1h ago
As a EE wannabe, I see everything in terms of impedance matching. It's all a very high dimension matching problem we tend to get good at, in order to survive.
godelski · 41m ago
I think of language like a lossy encoder-decoder system.
You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.
I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.
throwanem · 1h ago
Sure, but you do still have to try and get your point across.
omnicognate · 1h ago
That depends on the purpose of your writing.
smelendez · 1h ago
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
brianpan · 1h ago
The emphasis is a really interesting point and overlooked by the article. Your "went and" examples do seem very analogous to "try and". "He went and got himself arrested again," is less about the going and almost exclusively emphasizing the other half of the conjunction.
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
urquhartfe · 1h ago
> You can’t change the order.
You are confusing semantics with grammatical correctness. In both your examples, they would still be grammatically correct with reversed order.
(I would actually suggest they are still semantically reasonable too, but that's besides the point).
trimethylpurine · 1h ago
>I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.
A group works together. One offers to get flour, another offers to bake the cake.
A third could offer, "I'm going to both get some flour and bake a cake."
It would make sense to use "both."
raldi · 2h ago
I think most of the mysteries in this piece can be explained if “try and stop me” just an abbreviation for “try to stop me and see if you can”.
onionisafruit · 1h ago
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
samiskin · 54m ago
I think this capture’s the essence better than anything else, “try and” simply behaving as “try and see if I can” (or whatever fits instead of “I” here)
WaxProlix · 2h ago
This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.
foolswisdom · 2h ago
This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.
foldr · 2h ago
I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of “I’ll try and go to the store tomorrow”. There’s no implication that anyone is trying to stop me.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
OJFord · 2h ago
That example would be something like 'I'll try to go to the store tomorrow and see if I can' along the lines GP suggests. 'stop me' only came from the specific example they were using.
foldr · 2h ago
You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.
“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]
Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:
“What did you try and eat?”
* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”
There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:
*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”
cwmoore · 2h ago
"What did you try but spit out?"
foldr · 2h ago
That’s a regular case of across-the-board extraction from a coordination (where ‘try’ has a nominal direct object rather than a clausal complement):
What did you try ___ but spit ___ out?
The examples in the linked article involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.
cwmoore · 1m ago
Your examples are not ringing bells for me as a native speaker. The linguistics terms may or may not be confounding, but are too unfamiliar for me to discuss.
echelon · 2h ago
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
Linguists don’t say varieties are right or wrong (even though they might have private aesthetic opinions like everyone else). That would be like a biologist saying dogs are the correct version of mammals and cats are wrong and/or don’t exist.
If a modern linguist call any usage as wrong, I would ask for his diploma and check if I have to close his university, because clearly they shouldn't teach linguistics 101, let alone bring someone towards a PhD. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.
unscaled · 1h ago
These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].
As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.
Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.
[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.
The people they’re citing are either authors of usage guides or linguists who are simply noting that the usage has been deemed incorrect by some of the former.
Waterluvian · 3h ago
To me, “try to catch me!” feels more formal than “try and catch me!” Which feels kinda playful, but are both saying basically the same thing.
posix86 · 20m ago
Basically yes, but I do hear nuance, idk if it's right - "try and" feels more daring, like "I think you can't", while "try to" feels more neutral, just a command.
munchler · 3h ago
I think “try and” is used more by children than by adults, which is why it works well in this sort of playful, childlike phrase.
card_zero · 2h ago
Different sociolinguistic register, innit.
refactor_master · 2h ago
Interestingly this pattern also exists in Danish (though not for the same reasons). Correctly speaking you’d say “try to…” which is “prøv at…”, but since the infinitive “at” and “og” sort of both turned into /ə/ when quickly spoken and you get “prøv og…”.
arnsholt · 2h ago
Pseudo coordination is a fun phenomenon in Scandinavian. Lots of detail in NALS: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nals#/chapter/65 but an important difference with English is that the Scandinavian construction occurs with many more verbs in the first conjunct, not just _try_.
treetalker · 4h ago
Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
I thought from the title that this was going to be about some new exception handling mechanism in a programming language I'm not familiar with. In fact, the article was even more interesting than that, as I've often wondered about this in the past but never quite got to looking it up. Thank you!
onionisafruit · 1h ago
That’s exactly what happened with me. I expected some interesting programming content but ended up spending 20 minutes (so far) thinking about English grammar.
djtango · 50m ago
I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.
He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.
I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
Nezteb · 5m ago
[delayed]
urquhartfe · 1h ago
A lot of American commenters here are very much misunderstanding how "try and" is used in British English.
It genuinely is used essentially equivalently to "try to". Maybe there is some very slight semantic difference, but it's essentially the same.
justonceokay · 1h ago
The majority of the article is describing how it is different from “try to” in its usage. In short it acts more like a single phrase than as a literal future infinitive.
amenhotep · 29m ago
There's no usage of try and where try to wouldn't fit perfectly well and mean exactly the same thing. It's a weird construct with weird restrictions on how it can be applied grammatically, but it's not different in usage.
mathiaspoint · 1h ago
I'm American and use the phrase that way literally all the time. Also "Go ahead and..."
This article illustrates the main reason why prescriptive grammar is so boring.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
dcminter · 3h ago
British English speaker here (southern demographic) - I'd say "to" but "and" doesn't feel wrong so I think it's pretty prevalent.
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
SoftTalker · 41m ago
What about "try ya" as in "try ya some of that there salad." Something my mother-in-law would say.
Maybe it's different in America but this is being bizarrely over thought in the comments. It's a synonym for "try to".
starstripe · 2h ago
To me "try and" is like a more confident version of "try to." For example, "I will try to win" vs "I'll try and win."
o11c · 1h ago
That would be "try, and".
Although the default rule for conjunctions joining predicates is that the comma is optional (by contrast, in most other contexts it is either mandatory or forbidden), there are a lot of circumstances where the comma becomes mandatory to avoid ambiguity or just because.
Etheryte · 1h ago
The two are not interchangeable though, as shown in the article. If someone asks you "Are you going to win?", you could say "I'll try to", but not "I'll try and".
mbostleman · 47m ago
Try and is one of my worst grammatical nightmares. It pains me every time I hear it.
skrebbel · 3h ago
I'm not a native English speaker, but to me "try and" has always conveyed a sense of more deliberate trying, of getting over yourself, in the sense that the "try" means the choice to give it a real proper go. So first you try (or, in fact, decide to try) and then when you're fully committed and mentally prepared, then you do it.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
StevenWaterman · 2h ago
I'd describe it as:
- "try and" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from laziness / not actually attempting it
- "try to" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from incapability
As in:
- I'll try and kill the mosquito... that has been annoying me all day
- I'll try to kill the mosquito... but it's quite hard to hit with this gun
But nobody would notice if you used the wrong one.
echelon · 2h ago
I grew up in the Southeast, and this usage is common. Both in Southern accents and AAVE.
I agree with skrebbel's feeling about the phrase, and I think yours is also a little bit correct.
To add more character, I also think "try and" feels more casual and friendly. Less like a technical suggestion and more like a form of encouragement. More caring, less distance or annoyance.
"You should try and get some sleep. [I care about you, you poor thing.]" vs "You should try to get some sleep. [Why are you still awake?]"
There's more closeness with "try and" and more distance with "try to".
"Try to" feels formal, technical, distant. "Try and" feels comforting, compassionate, friendly, but definitely not something you'd use for a complex task.
I couldn't imagine "You should try and recalibrate your photon detector" ever being said.
StevenWaterman · 2h ago
I definitely agree with the difference in formality.
> You should try and recalibrate your photon detector
I can totally imagine this, in a lab where all the equipment is old, and out of calibration, and the person saying it knows there are 10 other things that are more important, but this thing is still pretty bad and they feel obligated to point out the issue.
Whereas "try to calibrate" sounds to me like the process of calibration is quite hard and it's likely to end up no better calibrated than you started with.
throwanem · 2h ago
It makes sense, as folk etymologies often do. But the phrase acts in a more conditional manner in Southern American English at least.
If I say "I'm going to change that light bulb," I'm probably already getting up to fetch my toolbag.
If I say "I'll try and change that light bulb," I may be wondering whether I have a spare or a ladder or something else whose lack will interrupt the job, or in some other way doubtful of success: the implication is I expect I may come back and say something about the job other than that it's done.
If I say "Well, I might could try and change that light bulb," I probably don't mean in any particular hurry even to get up off the couch, and indeed may already be dozing off.
furyofantares · 2h ago
I think that's exactly right. I say "try to" in more neutral situations, or noncommittal, or pessimistic. It conveys it's not my top priority to succeed. "I'll try and get it done today" is easy to imagine with a neutral tone or a downward tone, conveying that I may not get to it and it isn't my top priority. "I'll try and get it done today" is easier to imagine with a chipper tone, it's a higher priority for me, I intend to get to it.
This makes logical sense too, doesn't it? "Try and" implies success. I'm not actually saying "I'll try to get it done and I will get it done", if that was the case I'd skip the try, but I am evoking an idea in that direction.
clocker · 2h ago
When you say “I’ll try to do something…” you are giving a heads up to the other person that you may give up on that thing at any time. There is no commitment.
weird-eye-issue · 2h ago
"You try, and then you do."
But it doesn't mean that - it just means you will try which doesn't actually imply any level of action
avemg · 3h ago
I’m a native speaker from the US and I think you’re imagining things. “Try and” and “try to” are completely the same.
arduanika · 2h ago
I'm also a native speaker from the US. Non-native speakers often have extra insight into the nuances of language, and I think skrebbel's headcanon here is really interesting.
I almost see "try and" as a form of "manifesting", of optimism, of believing that you will succeed. This would sort of comport with what he's saying.
But any difference is subtle, and most native speakers won't notice it, beyond maybe the more formal register of "try to".
sidibe · 2h ago
Usually these extra insights are interesting but incorrect. Like here I think. I don't think there's any different expectations between someone saying "try and" and "try to" except it's maybe a very loosely correlated signal of social class
Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
ale · 3h ago
The article literally shows the “bare form” example where this kind of meaning can be inferred: e.g. “I will try and finish the assignment.”
weird-eye-issue · 3h ago
Which is identical to "I will try to finish the assignment", so what's your point?
LocalH · 56m ago
Ah, prescriptivism versus descriptivism.
Prescriptivism is appropriate for technical or legal discussions, where the specific meanings of words are hugely important.
Descriptivism is appropriate for casual communication, where it's fine as long as your intended meaning comes across.
lblume · 46m ago
Prescriptivism is inherently limited to situations where near-unanimous consent exists between all speakers.
DavidWoof · 37m ago
That's absolutely not what the article is about. Did you even read it?
People don't really have that debate anymore outside of twitter casuals, and it's dismissed with a wave almost immediately in this article, which then goes on to examine the complex grammar of "try and".
umanwizard · 18m ago
Yep. This is like someone seeing an article about geology and saying “ah, sphere earth vs. flat earth”. Like, no, the article already presupposes that the earth is spherical because that’s the viewpoint taken by all people with a serious academic interest in the topic.
OJFord · 2h ago
I don't understand the 'both is not possible' point, the example given just doesn't even attempt to add a second thing?
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
zahlman · 2h ago
The point specifically is that the "and" in "try and" conceptually should be "adding a second thing" (what they mean by "coordination"), but isn't doing so in a fully regular way. Specifically, it seems like it should coordinate "try to kill mosquitos" and "[actually] kill mosquitos", but that interpretation isn't fully compatible with how the word "and" normally works.
On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
OJFord · 2h ago
Ahh, got it, thanks - re-reading it makes more sense with the example of it being possible:
> Usually, coordinated verb phrases can be preceded by both:
> 9) Reality is Broken will both [stimulate your brain and stir your soul].
which would be a better example and clearer to me the first time if it didn't use two nouns ('stimulate and stir your soul').
CGamesPlay · 2h ago
The conjunction is "and", as in "try and kill" vs "kill and try".
fmajid · 2h ago
When I was in high school in France, where they teach British English, we were taught try and is the grammatically correct form.
tsunamifury · 24m ago
Try’n ta
throwanem · 2h ago
Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!
_jab · 2h ago
AAVE is definitely underappreciated as the source of a lot of common modern slang. But in this case, the article makes it pretty clear that "try and" is not nearly modern enough to have come from AAVE - they show several attestations from the 1500s and even mention one from 1390.
throwanem · 2h ago
If they had headed the first section differently, I would credit this argument. Under the name "Who says this?" as at present it bears, and with nothing there or elsewhere to justify the substantial and obvious exclusion, that section is substantially incomplete.
edit: But so is your own criticism, in that it ignores AAVE is not the only dialect I mentioned. It isn't even one I would say I really speak, except inasmuch as AAVE and my own SAE heavily overlap as the close siblings they are. Both deserve to be treated, not least for that interrelationship, as well as the one you mention with their forcible deracination into mesolect and acrolect slang, where the class origin makes such terms feel "edgy."
koops · 2h ago
Randy Meisner was not trying "to" love again. Usage settled.
lutusp · 1h ago
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
umanwizard · 1h ago
I don’t follow, can you give examples of what you mean?
lutusp · 1h ago
One might say, "benzodiazepines have a similar effect to alcohol", or "benzodiazepines have an effect similar to alcohol." The second construction is clearer in its meaning.
umanwizard · 42m ago
I don’t really get why one is in the wrong order? Maybe we’re parsing them differently somehow. The meaning reads identically to me although the parse tree is different.
Benzodiazepines have a similar effect to [the effect of] alcohol
Vs.
Benzodiazepines have an effect [which is] similar to [the effect of] alcohol.
shadowgovt · 3h ago
Hadn't heard about this project before; it's a really good idea.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
umanwizard · 1h ago
What you’re saying is probably true of all human languages. I don’t know of any where usage is actually governed by a governing body. Some try, e.g. the French Academy, but they are widely ignored in actual usage.
arduanika · 2h ago
Likewise. A really cool site.
The English language has so many little quirks. You can try to document them all, and it's a fun endeavor, but you can't try and document them all.
Traubenfuchs · 1h ago
> (a) try (./!)
> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!
> try as you may/might
> try is my favorite word
> try harder
> try 1/2/3/…
> try, quickly!
Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?
Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.
And I am not even a native speaker.
But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
text0404 · 4m ago
The sentence begins with "typically," indicating that the examples are not representative of all possible uses.
When writing numbers, the basic rule is to spell out numbers one through nine and use numerals for 10 and above.
The correct construction of "Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well" is actually "Methinks thou dost not know English very well."
The site is hosted by Yale, not Harvard.
Your last sentence has an extra comma and needs a question mark at the end.
jeffbee · 1h ago
Example usage: I will try and figure out how this page is causing the scrollbar to be white-on-white in a way that makes it useless.
cubefox · 1h ago
Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.
umanwizard · 1h ago
This article is not “blessing” anything, it’s trying to understand it. And I promise you that linguists have indeed given thought to why and under what circumstances people write “would of” instead of “would have”.
leeoniya · 1h ago
isnt it fundamentally just a mispronounced contraction of would've
umanwizard · 45m ago
Yes, and a huge chunk of language evolution is driven by things getting confused with other things due to phonological changes making them sound the same, so studying this is squarely within the realm of linguistics.
That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
cubefox · 59m ago
Of course, but linguists consider themselves to be scientists, so they are only allowed to describe and explain. They can't say that anything is wrong or bad. Even "would of." Prescriptive judgements are restricted to philosophers of language.
calvinmorrison · 1h ago
Try and is good. Philadelphia we also have good ones. especially dropping with/tos
- Down the shore
- done school, done work, done dinner.
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
What if two non-native speakers say something and understand each other?
Sorry, in this thread, I had to!
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
If that were the meaning, you would be able to say things like “I stubbed my toe and it hurts so bad I’m figuratively dying”, mirroring the colloquial meaning of “literally”. But nobody says this.
The actual new and non-traditional meaning of “literally” is as a generic intensifier, see e.g. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/literally
Oh, and by the way, the “traditional” meaning isn’t even the first one. According to my OED second edition, “literal” meaning “Of a translation, version, transcript, etc.: Representing the very words of the original; verbally exact.” is only attested since 1599.
The actual original meaning of “literal”: “of or pertaining to letters of the alphabet; of the nature of letters, alphabetical” is attested since 1475.
In their dialect, sure. In any given dialect, who knows?
Any speaker of a dialect that isn't West Coast American has likely watched actors who live in Los Angeles try, and fail, to speak their dialect.
"John will both try and like sushi" makes perfect sense, although there's an implied "to eat" verb separate from the "to like" verb in there that isn't present in the constructions the article is talking about.
Likewise, "I tried and finished the assignment," means "I tried (to do) the assignment and I finished it." Again, maybe not in writing, but with a certain inflection on 'tried' (where in writing maybe you'd put a comma or semi-colon to indicate a pause) this is something people actually say; although they may emphasis it with "I finally tried and actually finished the assignment." (Whereas maybe previously they weren't confident they could even do it and maybe didn't try.)
Included for no real reason: "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."
"Try and tell the truth"
Since it clearly should be "try to tell the truth"
However this one, while similar in construction, doesn't actually sound nearly as bad:
"Try and finish the assignment"
It can be fixed the same way ("try to finish") but it also accept GP's form too, which would be "try (to work hard) and (see if you can) finish the assignment". As I say, for whatever reason this second example sounds much more reasonable to me— I think at least in part my brain is much more accepting of a word that feels dropped than one that's misused.
Can we have also declare war on using "exponentially" in place of "significantly"?
I understand the feeling, but language is what language does. It will change and you will notice those changes if you're alive long enough :)
Even prescriptivist languages (as my own native language tends to be) cannot escape. I'm bad at my own native language because I've been living elsewhere for very long... but not as bad as the Kids These Days :)
I think the article is incorrect on this though, try always and tell the truth is a perfectly fine albeit slightly anachronistic usage that would mean
Whatever you do you must always try (that is to say not give up), and tell the truth.
One might also assume that you should tell the truth about trying always is the meaning, but at any rate it is not a phrasing that would be out of order a few hundred years ago.
https://imgur.com/QBTlxf7
It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.
My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.
The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.
Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.
Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.
But in 99% of situations no such context exists and "that's grammatically incorrect" is a bullshit statement.
In the UK when someone "corrects" language what they are very often doing is engaging in class signalling. It's widely done and widely accepted but personally I think it's pointless and somewhat toxic.
(Note many languages have government-sanctioned standard forms of the language, but what I said is still true there too. Nobody speaks that dialect and nobody should be expected to. It's just a "reference implementation".)
Many of those languages have mutually unintelligible dialects. The reference implementation exists to patch communication when you run into trouble with people who aren’t from your village.
Even American English has this. People from Appalachia register switch to more standard English when they’re not home, for example. Or a high schooler will tamper their slang when talking to grandma.
You could also argue international business English is a contrived dialect used primarily by ESL speakers. It definitely has many differences from any English spoken natively at home.
Same is true in the US, though ethnicity is in the mix too. White and black Americans are historically distinct cultural groups which speak different dialects (though obviously, since the end of slavery and segregation the groups are mixing more and more). It is no coincidence that varieties spoken by white people ended up as the “standard”.
It's also that language is pretty inherently a very fuzzy, ambiguous, and imprecise thing. If I say, "I've left my cup on the table," then you know what I mean even though you've never seen my cup nor my table. Everyone reading that sentence is equally convinced that it's quite concrete, even though everyone is also imagining a completely different cup on a completely different table.
Even more fascinating, it's likely that nobody that ever reads this post will have met me in person. We have not specifically agreed in advance what our words mean, merely relied upon collective agreement based solely on historic usage.
Honestly, the idea that two people who have never met, never seen each other, maybe never even lived in the same hemisphere, might speak the same language and be able to converse freely is an astonishing feat of magic.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
Ellipses are properly written as three dots.
You compress/encode your thoughts into words. The the listener/reader decompresses/decodes your words into thoughts. As long as we don't think thoughts and words are the same thing, then yeah, you're right.
I think this also helps with communication in general because it forces you to think more about what someone is saying. There's no way you can put all your thoughts into words. Decoding is highly affected by prior knowledge, culture, and all that jazz. It's why you can make a confusing array of unintelligible noises and gestures at a friend and they'll understand but everyone else around is left confused. I think this also explains a lot of fights on the internet, as it is easy to misinterpret and with no perfect encoding it's hard to write to an audience of everyone.
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
"Try and" can operate the same way by de-emphasizing the trying. If Dr. Dre said "I'm gonna try to change the course of hip hop again," the sentence is about attempting to do something. On the other hand, "try and" makes the sentence more assured- Dr Dre is going try it and then do it.
I wonder if this half about ordering, half about emphasizing is the reason for the special rules of usage.
You are confusing semantics with grammatical correctness. In both your examples, they would still be grammatically correct with reversed order.
(I would actually suggest they are still semantically reasonable too, but that's besides the point).
A group works together. One offers to get flour, another offers to bake the cake.
A third could offer, "I'm going to both get some flour and bake a cake."
It would make sense to use "both."
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]
Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:
“What did you try and eat?”
* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”
There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:
*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”
What did you try ___ but spit ___ out?
The examples in the linked article involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
You can't really reign in language.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-are-perfect-...
As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.
Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.
[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...
[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.
[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
[1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)
He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.
I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
It genuinely is used essentially equivalently to "try to". Maybe there is some very slight semantic difference, but it's essentially the same.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
Although the default rule for conjunctions joining predicates is that the comma is optional (by contrast, in most other contexts it is either mandatory or forbidden), there are a lot of circumstances where the comma becomes mandatory to avoid ambiguity or just because.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
- "try and" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from laziness / not actually attempting it
- "try to" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from incapability
As in:
- I'll try and kill the mosquito... that has been annoying me all day
- I'll try to kill the mosquito... but it's quite hard to hit with this gun
But nobody would notice if you used the wrong one.
I agree with skrebbel's feeling about the phrase, and I think yours is also a little bit correct.
To add more character, I also think "try and" feels more casual and friendly. Less like a technical suggestion and more like a form of encouragement. More caring, less distance or annoyance.
"You should try and get some sleep. [I care about you, you poor thing.]" vs "You should try to get some sleep. [Why are you still awake?]"
There's more closeness with "try and" and more distance with "try to".
"Try to" feels formal, technical, distant. "Try and" feels comforting, compassionate, friendly, but definitely not something you'd use for a complex task.
I couldn't imagine "You should try and recalibrate your photon detector" ever being said.
> You should try and recalibrate your photon detector
I can totally imagine this, in a lab where all the equipment is old, and out of calibration, and the person saying it knows there are 10 other things that are more important, but this thing is still pretty bad and they feel obligated to point out the issue.
Whereas "try to calibrate" sounds to me like the process of calibration is quite hard and it's likely to end up no better calibrated than you started with.
If I say "I'm going to change that light bulb," I'm probably already getting up to fetch my toolbag.
If I say "I'll try and change that light bulb," I may be wondering whether I have a spare or a ladder or something else whose lack will interrupt the job, or in some other way doubtful of success: the implication is I expect I may come back and say something about the job other than that it's done.
If I say "Well, I might could try and change that light bulb," I probably don't mean in any particular hurry even to get up off the couch, and indeed may already be dozing off.
This makes logical sense too, doesn't it? "Try and" implies success. I'm not actually saying "I'll try to get it done and I will get it done", if that was the case I'd skip the try, but I am evoking an idea in that direction.
But it doesn't mean that - it just means you will try which doesn't actually imply any level of action
I almost see "try and" as a form of "manifesting", of optimism, of believing that you will succeed. This would sort of comport with what he's saying.
But any difference is subtle, and most native speakers won't notice it, beyond maybe the more formal register of "try to".
Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
Prescriptivism is appropriate for technical or legal discussions, where the specific meanings of words are hugely important.
Descriptivism is appropriate for casual communication, where it's fine as long as your intended meaning comes across.
People don't really have that debate anymore outside of twitter casuals, and it's dismissed with a wave almost immediately in this article, which then goes on to examine the complex grammar of "try and".
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
> Usually, coordinated verb phrases can be preceded by both:
> 9) Reality is Broken will both [stimulate your brain and stir your soul].
which would be a better example and clearer to me the first time if it didn't use two nouns ('stimulate and stir your soul').
edit: But so is your own criticism, in that it ignores AAVE is not the only dialect I mentioned. It isn't even one I would say I really speak, except inasmuch as AAVE and my own SAE heavily overlap as the close siblings they are. Both deserve to be treated, not least for that interrelationship, as well as the one you mention with their forcible deracination into mesolect and acrolect slang, where the class origin makes such terms feel "edgy."
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
Benzodiazepines have a similar effect to [the effect of] alcohol
Vs.
Benzodiazepines have an effect [which is] similar to [the effect of] alcohol.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
The English language has so many little quirks. You can try to document them all, and it's a fun endeavor, but you can't try and document them all.
> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!
> try as you may/might
> try is my favorite word
> try harder
> try 1/2/3/…
> try, quickly!
Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?
Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.
And I am not even a native speaker.
But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
When writing numbers, the basic rule is to spell out numbers one through nine and use numerals for 10 and above.
The correct construction of "Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well" is actually "Methinks thou dost not know English very well."
The site is hosted by Yale, not Harvard.
Your last sentence has an extra comma and needs a question mark at the end.
That said, the one-off simple example of “would of” is probably not interesting enough to write a big article about.
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore