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)
‘Try and’ is correct British English and the Register is a UK publication. If the author had written ‘to try make’ they would have gotten in trouble with their editor and ‘to try to make’ doesn’t flow as well, to my eyes at least.
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?
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).
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!
And also ignoring British English (and probably other international Englishes too); writing ‘try put’, ‘go put’ or ‘go see’ for example would get a red mark and a correction from the teacher in the UK.
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…”.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 73.8 ms ] threadTry to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
[1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
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?
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).
Using try and is such a huge pet peeve of mine. I almost don’t want to understand how it might be acceptable even though the ship has sailed.
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore
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.”
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.
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.
> 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.