 |
 | Home | Contact Us | FAQ | Search & Site Map | Link to Us |
 | Sign In | Join | Other 45 Sites in Network |
| HomeDiscussion GroupsEnglish UsageBritish EnglishESL Teaching Learnglish.com Contact UsLink To UsSearch & Site Map |
Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006The best way to
Hi, As ususal, I ask for your help whenever I come up with a problem. Here is the sentence that I am not sure of its usage. Please give me your valuable opinions. Thanks in advance. Mark Twain once remarked that "The best way to cheer yourself is try to cheer someone else up." Since it is a Mark Twain quotation, I think I had better ask for your opinion about the usage of "the way to ..." What I don't understand here is why Twain used "try" instead of "to try". Don't we need to put "to" before a second verb to show our next action. Or the usage here is the same as this pattern: "All I want to do is +Verb" or "What I have to do is +Verb" Gloria > Mark Twain once remarked that "The best way to cheer yourself is try to > cheer someone else up." [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > the same as this pattern: "All I want to do is +Verb" or "What I have > to do is +Verb" Strictly speaking, yes, you are correct: "to try" is wanted. One can interpret what Twain, a careful writer, intended in--I would say--either of two ways. Either he was being colloquially laconic for felicity by eliding a word he reckoned his readership could well supply (note that there are *already* two uses of "to" in that sentence), or he meant it to be taken as something like: "The best way to cheer yourself is: try to cheer someone else up." >> Mark Twain once remarked that "The best way to cheer yourself is try to >> cheer someone else up." [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > he meant it to be taken as something like: "The best way to cheer > yourself is: try to cheer someone else up." Twain is very deliberate in his use of regional dialect, and that needs to be taken into account if his work is going to be used to teach language, as opposed to teaching his work itself. I disagree with Eric about the strict sense of *to try* because Twain is embedding an imperative command: Try to cheer someone up if you yourself are sad. That is another way to state what he is saying without the superlative. Joanne > >> Mark Twain once remarked that "The best way to cheer yourself is try to > >> cheer someone else up." [...] > > Strictly speaking, yes, you are correct: "to try" is wanted. One can > > interpret what Twain, a careful writer, intended in--I would [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > embedding an imperative command: Try to cheer someone up if you yourself > are sad. That is another way to state what he is saying without the superlative. To argue that Twain is "embedding an imperative command" is simply to repeat the second possibility I laid out above. The interpretations offered *each* require that one make some assumption about what Twain was doing, and neither is especially more likely than the other. |
Reply to this Message |
 Sign In
 Join
 My Latest Posts My Monitored Threads My Blog My Photo Gallery My Profile My Homepage Start New Thread Enable EMail Alerts Rate this Thread
|
©2012 Advenet LLC Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
This website includes both content owned or controlled by Advenet as well as content owned or controlled by third parties.