10 ms·

Try and

660 points by treetalker 1y ago

tempodox 1y ago
English, Simplified is now called “grammatical diversity”? That’s so politically correct.
treetalker 1y 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) [1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)
- quietbritishjim 1y ago
  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 1y 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.
- cxr 1y ago
  In his comments on the use of symbols P and V in semaphores, Dijkstra gave the reason for choosing P as it having come from "probeer te verlagen", which he infamously explained that when translated into English means "try and decrease" [sic].
- willyt 1y ago
  ‘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.
dcminter 1y 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.
skrebbel 1y 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?
- avemg 1y 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.
  - ale 1y 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 1y ago
      Which is identical to "I will try to finish the assignment", so what's your point?
  - arduanika 1y 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 1y 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.
Waterluvian 1y 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.
- munchler 1y 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 1y ago
    Different sociolinguistic register, innit.
- posix86 1y 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.
  - Waterluvian 1y ago
    Yeah like if a kid runs off and says “try to catch me!” It’s a “c’mon and play!” But “try and catch me” is a challenge, a dare, a taunt even.
  - segmondy 1y ago
    You are right on the nuance. "try and catch me" for me, means I'm going to give it my all not to be caught and I believe I will not be caught. Good luck, try and catch me. "Try to catch me" means I think you might have some chance.
shadowgovt 1y 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).
- arduanika 1y 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.
- School-Cotton 1y 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.
koops 1y ago
Randy Meisner was not trying "to" love again. Usage settled.
raldi 1y 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”.
- foolswisdom 1y ago
  This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.
- foldr 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
throwanem 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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."
- willyt 1y ago
  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.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    *'Try put' is also incorrect in American English, as discussed in the article. It isn't incorrect in my view, just hampered by its authors' lack of diligence.
codezero 1y ago
Do or do not. There is no try and. 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.
refactor_master 1y 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 1y ago
  Pseudo coordination is a fun phenomenon in Scandinavian. Lots of detail in NALS: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nals#/chapter/65 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_.
  - refactor_master 1y ago
    Interesting. I’ve never encountered this before in Danish. Their examples seem very dialect-ish.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  This sounds a little closer to “should’v” which should be “should have” but then people also say “should of”
OJFord 1y 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?
- CGamesPlay 1y ago
  The conjunction is "and", as in "try and kill" vs "kill and try".
- zahlman 1y 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 1y 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').
starstripe 1y 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."
- RShackleford 1y ago
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- o11c 1y 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 1y 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".
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Not sure this works in simple past though. Cf. Dune “They tried and failed? They tried and died”
SoftTalker 1y ago
What about "try ya" as in "try ya some of that there salad." Something my mother-in-law would say.
- csande17 1y ago
  That sounds like a "personal dative" to me: https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/personal-datives https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/personal-datives
38 1y ago
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zvr 1y ago
The whole parent directory of "Phenomena" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category is an amazing source of information!
- StevenWaterman 1y ago
  I might have to adopt this way of differeniating OR and XOR in English https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one
  - skrebbel 1y ago
    You'd enjoy the Finnish language, which has separate words for OR and XOR (and also has only one word for he/she/xe/etc, as a bonus)
jp0001 1y 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.
- bjackman 1y 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 1y 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.
    - bjackman 1y ago
      Yes I experience this regularly with Hochdeutsch and I stand by my point. You still don't speak the language exactly as specified and it's still nonsensical to "correct" someone's grammar/pronunciation if you understood them.
deleted 1y ago
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fmajid 1y ago
When I was in high school in France, where they teach British English, we were taught try and is the grammatically correct form.
calvinmorrison 1y ago
Try and is good. Philadelphia we also have good ones. especially dropping with/tos - Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner. Also my favorite is anymore: - gas is so expensive anymore
smelendez 1y 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.”
- trimethylpurine 1y 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."
- urquhartfe 1y 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).
- brianpan 1y 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.
- KurSix 1y ago
lutusp 1y 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.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  I don’t follow, can you give examples of what you mean?
  - lutusp 1y 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.
    - School-Cotton 1y 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.
School-Cotton 1y ago
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.
- layer8 1y ago
  Why not both? ;)
cubefox 1y ago
Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.
- School-Cotton 1y 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 1y ago
    isnt it fundamentally just a mispronounced contraction of would've
    - cubefox 1y 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.
    - School-Cotton 1y 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.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  This looks like a false equivalence. Why are we comparing a commonly-accepted usage, hundreds of years old, to what amounts to a spelling error?
jeffbee 1y 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.
Traubenfuchs 1y 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 1y ago
  The sentence begins with "typically," indicating that the examples are not representative of all possible uses. When writing numbers, spell out 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.
jeffWrld 1y ago
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urquhartfe 1y 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.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  I'm American and use the phrase that way literally all the time. Also "Go ahead and..."
- justonceokay 1y 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 1y 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.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Try and find out.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  Actually, this is the same way it's used in America. Maybe there's a subtle distinction in rare cases, but it's been more or less deflated. There might be some boomer grammar prescriptivists who are saying otherwise, but they aren't doing linguistics.
LocalH 1y 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 1y ago
  Prescriptivism is inherently limited to situations where near-unanimous consent exists between all speakers.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    Nah, prescriptivists love writing books saying that a thing almost everybody does - sometimes including themselves - is wrong. Prescriptivist amateurs with strong opinions sell reasonably well, publishers are quite fond. But this is part of a project by academics and the academics abandoned prescriptivism because it's not science. We don't have prescriptivist chemists or physicists either.
    - windward 1y ago
      Do you have any examples of the books?
      - tialaramex 1y ago
        "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss or "Her Ladyship's Guide to the Queen's English" by Caroline Taggart would be examples.
- DavidWoof 1y 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".
nmeofthestate 1y ago
Maybe it's different in America but this is being bizarrely over thought in the comments. It's a synonym for "try to".
- layer8 1y ago
  The article discusses how it’s not.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  Agreed. For the most part it's been deflated to a synonym. The analysis goes too deep into past usage which has mostly become obsolete.
djtango 1y 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 1y ago
  I spent 20 minutes looking for an Esperanto reference to this but could only find pages related to "in" words [1] and profane neologisms [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_%22in%22_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms
- DamnInteresting 1y ago
  I know someone whose work is cited in the "Try and" paper, and she asked me to pass this along in response to your comment: > Feel free to let djtango know that the paper they're looking for is Bergen (2001), "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto". It's a minor classic and deserves any attention it gets! I searched for the title, and this PDF was among the top matches: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf
  - djtango 1y ago
    Just saw this - thanks for sharing
mbostleman 1y ago
Try and is one of my worst grammatical nightmares. It pains me every time I hear it.
derefr 1y ago
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]."
- tomsmeding 1y ago
  It's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te"). The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.) For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]". Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context. The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
  - trealira 1y ago
    Funnily enough, this has resulted in people saying things like "見てみましょう" and "見てみてください", which confused me at first. But I suppose this is like non-native English speakers being confused by the extra "do" in phrases like "I already did do my work."
tsunamifury 1y ago
Try’n ta
Raj7k 1y ago
Why there are so many rules for speaking
foysavas 1y ago
The "and" in "try and..." may be a shorthand for the material implication of two temporal modal paths: "try and X" = can X -> must X = not can X or must X That said, the word "both" doesn't collocate before "try and X" because it instead pushes us toward an interpretation as logical conjunction: "both try and X" = can X and must X Likewise, despite the usage of "try not to", the phrase "try not and" doesn't show up, because under material implication the phrase becomes nonsense: "try not and X" = not can X -> must X = can X or must X
- baobun 1y ago
  OTOH "you mustn't try and X" sounds plausible, which tracks.
bsoles 1y ago
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
- eaglelizard 1y ago
  Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't. It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have." I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from. I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger). E.g.: "You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral "You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general: "Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?" "Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?" "We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
  - bendigedig 1y ago
    > Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't. I think they specifically meant "should of" which is a colloquial form of "should've" in a number of places in the UK. I went to school with a large number of people who would write "I should of done X instead of Y". In fact I'm pretty sure I made that "mistake" a number of times growing up.
euroderf 1y ago
"try and" is a pet peeve of mine. "try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
- thfuran 1y ago
  What’s your position on “finna”?
  - euroderf 1y ago
    Never heard of it ! (Am from NE US.)
jagthebeetle 1y ago
This construction is similar to a hendiadys (which comes from the Greek for "one through two"); e.g. "nice and warm." (So says Fowler anyway.)
Sardtok 1y ago
It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial. This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form. I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
- Arn_Thor 1y ago
  First thing I thought of when reading the linked post! You explained it for a non-Norwegian audience better than I could have too!
- triyambakam 1y ago
  Professor Faarlund might agree > In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    And in that case, "try and" is potentially very old and very "correct" English.
    - triyambakam 1y ago
      I don't disagree but I don't follow what you mean in response to Faarlund's theory?
      - hopelite 1y ago
        He may be referring to what I suspect too, that even though it is unlikely that any one Germanic language has the key to this, let alone the many similar linguistic mysteries, deeply diving into each of the languages to graph connections will likely provide the best chance at solving such things. I believe that not only do we have a hard time with this matter because our conception of what “try” means today is not original, but also that effectively “try and” and “try to” are effectively different concepts of the mind that we simply do not understand anymore, homographs whose separate original meanings and appropriate uses have been lost over time. I look forward to what LLMs will be able to unlock with this kind of historical and linguistic analysis. I think we will start unlocking some interesting this this way. I could see us being able to, to some degree, rewind linguistic history and also then apply it to historical context. Imagine an LLM that can not only graph all languages and meanings in those languages, but will also be able to infer meanings and origins going back into history by cross referencing all related languages … at least with some degree of accuracy greater than what we can do today. Now we just need all historical texts in digital form and to not erase all life on the planet.
bravesoul2 1y ago
> In dialects of Northeastern Canada, parallel inflected forms are acceptable: > 12) They tries and does that. There is a Ricky Jervais show https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) where the main character talks like this alot but not because that is common in the UK but perhaps to show he is a bit simple/slow. I think there is a danger in making that assumption about anyone based on the accent or general way they talk.
selimthegrim 1y ago
Surprised if they are quoting Dr Dre they don’t mention “run and…” (as in “run and tell that”)
throwmeaway222 1y ago
The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible.
- drewbeck 1y ago
  Descriptivism is much much older than 10 years but that is perhaps when you first became aware of it.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible. Makes me wonder how people managed to speak English before they invented grammar rules. /s
- sgentle 1y ago
  When you say "allow"... what exactly do you imagine happening if Yale's linguistic department forbids people from using English in certain ways? Or is this more of a federal government thing? Grammar Force as the seventh branch of the US Military? What about other countries... are we thinking NATO or UN? Either way, gonna be tough to try and convince the Brits that US English is the correct one, since we didn't exactly get permission from them in the first place.
rezmason 1y ago
At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal. This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all
- nine_k 1y ago
  Why, "try and" could be like "try / finally", and "what all" could be filter(). I won't mind "await y'all" to await multiple promises.
  - AlienRobot 1y ago
    What if... try { let x = parseInt(input); and { displayResult(x / 0); } } catch { displayError("Parsing error.") } And the catch can't catch a division by zero error because it occurred inside an "and" block.
    - rcxdude 1y ago
      That's kind of like python's try/else, but not quite (the 'and' would be more general, if you can interleave them with statements in the try block)
    - sillysaurusx 1y ago
      In practice you can move the displayResult(x / 0) outside the try catch. It’s hard to think of a counterexample that comes up in practice. There might be something to this idea, because I’ve often been in situations where a try catch catches an error that originates a dozen frames down the call stack, which is sometimes (but not always) unrelated to the original point of the try catch block. People try and deal with this by adding more try catches around the code deeper in the call stack, but maybe there’s a better way.
- nroets 1y ago
  What is this JavaScript thing ? I guess I come from a different era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM
ziroshima 1y ago
It makes sense from a boolean perspective. E.g "I'll try and go to the store." If the try fails, you did not go to the store.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  Only if your language has short-circuiting booleans.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  That’s just the meaning of “try” tho; “I’ll try to go to the store” is identical in meaning
  - pnut 1y ago
    For that matter, "trying" is implied by "going", and you could just say "I'll go to the store".
    - petesergeant 1y ago
      Nah, there's a markèd difference in the expressed certainty there
kwoff 1y ago
"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos." Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.
jmbwell 1y ago
The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion. Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.” Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.” I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
- purplehat_ 1y ago
  Interesting, where I’m from in southern california, “try and” doesn’t entail completion. (The article only mentions this for “go and”, which here does indeed entail expected completion.)
- sssilver 1y ago
  Doesn’t “try” imply possibility of failure to complete?
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    "Could you wash the dog?" Is not a question asking whether the person is capable of washing the dog. It's a command phrased politely. "Try to wash the dog" "Try and wash the dog" If you had no prior information on whether the dog likes water or not, I'd say that the try-and version expresses a greater level of confidence that washing the dog will be successful, in other words it's a command. Whereas try-to could be read either straight (this task may fail) or as a command phrased politely.
    - cratermoon 1y ago
      The linguistic prescriptivist in in me cringes at "try and", but I recognize usage has moved on. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/were-going-to-explain-the-deal-with-try-and-and-try-to https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/were-going-to-explai...
hidelooktropic 1y ago
Reminds me of the incorrect "A whole nother"
- vehemenz 1y ago
  That's a quaint way of saying "another"—not appropriate for formal use—but not quite incorrect either.
GaryGapinski 1y ago
The use of "try and" is usually grammatically incorrect (when "try to" was meant).
- dddgghhbbfblk 1y ago
  Prescriptively, maybe. But it is certainly grammatical in the sense that linguists normally use. "Try and" sounds perfectly natural to my own ears and it is regularly used by native English speakers.
kazinator 1y ago
"try and <clause>" is syntactically correct. That is to say, > I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop. can be parsed as > I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop. which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them. It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence: > I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game". Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try": > Linguists, go ahead and fight me!
- jameshart 1y ago
  There's explanations in the article of why 'try and' can't be parsed as simply as that kind of parallel ellipsis structure. No reordering: You can't rephrase as I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop and try the way you can I'm going to watch the game and crack open a beer No use of both: You can't say I'm going to both try and change the course of Hip-Hop the way you could I'm going to both crack open a beer and watch the game No inflections: You can't say I have tried and changed the course of Hip-Hop the way you can I have cracked open a beer and watched the game
KurSix 1y ago
The syntactic quirks make it feel like a weird halfway point between coordination and some fossilized idiom
willyt 1y ago
‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.
- mdcurran 1y ago
  'Go put your shoes on' is sensical in British English. If I heard someone saying this, I wouldn't bat an eye.
  - willyt 1y ago
    Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)
  - lpribis 1y ago
    'Go put your shoes on' is just another slightly different example of pseudo-coordination. I'm guessing that is has various levels of acceptance per-dialect (even within the UK) just like 'try and'.
- vehemenz 1y ago
  Both are "correct." I'm not saying this is why, but there are many dialects in British English, so it might be more difficult to pin down what is "correct" compared to American English.
  - 1y ago
dataflow 1y ago
Hang on. Isn't "try and" just completely different from "try to"? "Can I leave work early?" "Try and see." This is at worst a threat, and at best telling the other person to just do it and ask for forgiveness later afterward than for permission beforehand. "Can I leave work early?" "Try to see." This is telling the person to go research the answer to figure it out properly. And it feels less natural to say it too. How can these be interchangeable in meaning? If anything they feel closer to being opposite in meaning here.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  I think your example shows [try] and [see], where as this article is about [try and] see.
- nyeah 1y ago
  Sure, but that's not the same use of the phrase. To me, "try and get some of those new fries" means more or less the same as "try to get some of those new fries". Maybe "try and see" is an exception to "try and ___".
itslennysfault 1y ago
This is also the construction used for FAFO FA = "try" (as a vulgar slang) When you de-vulgar/de-slang it it becomes: try and find out
- varunneal 1y ago
  I think this is a different construction. "And" in "try and find out" is acting as a conjunction, separating two different actions
lacoolj 1y ago
what about "I'll try better"?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

660 points by treetalker 1y ago

English, Simplified is now called “grammatical diversity”? That’s so politically correct.

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) [1]: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44854639)

quietbritishjim 1y ago
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 1y 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.
cxr 1y ago
In his comments on the use of symbols P and V in semaphores, Dijkstra gave the reason for choosing P as it having come from "probeer te verlagen", which he infamously explained that when translated into English means "try and decrease" [sic].
willyt 1y ago
‘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.

dcminter 1y 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.

skrebbel 1y 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?

avemg 1y 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.
- ale 1y 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 1y ago
    Which is identical to "I will try to finish the assignment", so what's your point?
- arduanika 1y 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 1y 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.

Waterluvian 1y 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.

munchler 1y 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 1y ago
  Different sociolinguistic register, innit.
posix86 1y 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.
- Waterluvian 1y ago
  Yeah like if a kid runs off and says “try to catch me!” It’s a “c’mon and play!” But “try and catch me” is a challenge, a dare, a taunt even.
- segmondy 1y ago
  You are right on the nuance. "try and catch me" for me, means I'm going to give it my all not to be caught and I believe I will not be caught. Good luck, try and catch me. "Try to catch me" means I think you might have some chance.

shadowgovt 1y 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).

arduanika 1y 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.
School-Cotton 1y 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.

koops 1y ago

Randy Meisner was not trying "to" love again. Usage settled.

raldi 1y 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”.

foolswisdom 1y ago
This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.
foldr 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago

throwanem 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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."
willyt 1y ago
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.
- throwanem 1y ago
  *'Try put' is also incorrect in American English, as discussed in the article. It isn't incorrect in my view, just hampered by its authors' lack of diligence.

codezero 1y ago

Do or do not. There is no try and. 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.

refactor_master 1y 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 1y ago
Pseudo coordination is a fun phenomenon in Scandinavian. Lots of detail in NALS: https://tekstlab.uio.no/nals#/chapter/65 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_.
- refactor_master 1y ago
  Interesting. I’ve never encountered this before in Danish. Their examples seem very dialect-ish.
petesergeant 1y ago
This sounds a little closer to “should’v” which should be “should have” but then people also say “should of”

OJFord 1y 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?

CGamesPlay 1y ago
The conjunction is "and", as in "try and kill" vs "kill and try".
zahlman 1y 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 1y 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').

starstripe 1y 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."

RShackleford 1y ago
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o11c 1y 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 1y 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".
selimthegrim 1y ago
Not sure this works in simple past though. Cf. Dune “They tried and failed? They tried and died”

SoftTalker 1y ago

What about "try ya" as in "try ya some of that there salad." Something my mother-in-law would say.

csande17 1y ago
That sounds like a "personal dative" to me: https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/personal-datives https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/personal-datives

38 1y ago

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zvr 1y ago

The whole parent directory of "Phenomena" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category is an amazing source of information!

StevenWaterman 1y ago
I might have to adopt this way of differeniating OR and XOR in English https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/alternative-one
- skrebbel 1y ago
  You'd enjoy the Finnish language, which has separate words for OR and XOR (and also has only one word for he/she/xe/etc, as a bonus)

jp0001 1y 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.

bjackman 1y 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 1y 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.
  - bjackman 1y ago
    Yes I experience this regularly with Hochdeutsch and I stand by my point. You still don't speak the language exactly as specified and it's still nonsensical to "correct" someone's grammar/pronunciation if you understood them.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

fmajid 1y ago

When I was in high school in France, where they teach British English, we were taught try and is the grammatically correct form.

calvinmorrison 1y ago

Try and is good. Philadelphia we also have good ones. especially dropping with/tos - Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner. Also my favorite is anymore: - gas is so expensive anymore

smelendez 1y 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.”

trimethylpurine 1y 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."
urquhartfe 1y 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).
brianpan 1y 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.
KurSix 1y ago

lutusp 1y 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.

School-Cotton 1y ago
I don’t follow, can you give examples of what you mean?
- lutusp 1y 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.
  - School-Cotton 1y 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.

School-Cotton 1y ago

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.

layer8 1y ago
Why not both? ;)

cubefox 1y ago

Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.

School-Cotton 1y 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 1y ago
  isnt it fundamentally just a mispronounced contraction of would've
  - cubefox 1y 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.
  - School-Cotton 1y 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.
vehemenz 1y ago
This looks like a false equivalence. Why are we comparing a commonly-accepted usage, hundreds of years old, to what amounts to a spelling error?

jeffbee 1y 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.

Traubenfuchs 1y 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 1y ago
The sentence begins with "typically," indicating that the examples are not representative of all possible uses. When writing numbers, spell out 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.

jeffWrld 1y ago

[dead]

urquhartfe 1y 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.

mathiaspoint 1y ago
I'm American and use the phrase that way literally all the time. Also "Go ahead and..."
justonceokay 1y 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 1y 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.
pixl97 1y ago
Try and find out.
vehemenz 1y ago
Actually, this is the same way it's used in America. Maybe there's a subtle distinction in rare cases, but it's been more or less deflated. There might be some boomer grammar prescriptivists who are saying otherwise, but they aren't doing linguistics.

LocalH 1y 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 1y ago
Prescriptivism is inherently limited to situations where near-unanimous consent exists between all speakers.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  Nah, prescriptivists love writing books saying that a thing almost everybody does - sometimes including themselves - is wrong. Prescriptivist amateurs with strong opinions sell reasonably well, publishers are quite fond. But this is part of a project by academics and the academics abandoned prescriptivism because it's not science. We don't have prescriptivist chemists or physicists either.
  - windward 1y ago
    Do you have any examples of the books?
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss or "Her Ladyship's Guide to the Queen's English" by Caroline Taggart would be examples.
DavidWoof 1y 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".

nmeofthestate 1y ago

Maybe it's different in America but this is being bizarrely over thought in the comments. It's a synonym for "try to".

layer8 1y ago
The article discusses how it’s not.
vehemenz 1y ago
Agreed. For the most part it's been deflated to a synonym. The analysis goes too deep into past usage which has mostly become obsolete.

djtango 1y 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 1y ago
I spent 20 minutes looking for an Esperanto reference to this but could only find pages related to "in" words [1] and profane neologisms [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_%22in%22_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary#Cultural_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_profanity#Neologisms
DamnInteresting 1y ago
I know someone whose work is cited in the "Try and" paper, and she asked me to pass this along in response to your comment: > Feel free to let djtango know that the paper they're looking for is Bergen (2001), "Nativization processes in L1 Esperanto". It's a minor classic and deserves any attention it gets! I searched for the title, and this PDF was among the top matches: https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf https://pages.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/papers/NEJCL.pdf
- djtango 1y ago
  Just saw this - thanks for sharing

mbostleman 1y ago

Try and is one of my worst grammatical nightmares. It pains me every time I hear it.

derefr 1y ago

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]."

tomsmeding 1y ago
It's even better. The "X-te" (Xて) is technically not X in present tense, it is specifically X in the te-form (て is read "te"). The te-form has a bunch of different uses, but in the case of "verb-te verb", if the second verb is not one of a list of special verbs (of which miru (見る, to see) is one), X-te Y normally means "X and Y". For example, yorugohan o tsukutte taberu (夜ご飯を作って食べる) means "(to/I/we/you/...) make dinner and eat it": yorugohan is dinner, the "o" is a particle marking the direct object, tsukuru means to make (becomes tsukutte in the te-form) and taberu means to eat. (The first word in English is ambiguous because grammatical subjects are usually optional in Japanese, plus its verbs are not inflected for person or number.) For a number of verbs, however, if they are in the second position, the phrase gets a special meaning. If it's miru, e.g. tsukutte miru, it means "to try to make" — or perhaps more aptly, "to try and make". If it's iku (行く, to go), it means "to go X-ing": tabete iku (where taberu (to eat) -> tabete in the te-form) is "to go to eat [something]", or perhaps: "to go and eat [something]". Not all such special verbs correspond to English pseudocoordination though; a common one is shimau (the dictionary says "to finish / to stop", but it's uncommon in bare form), where e.g. tabete shimau means "to finish eating" or "to end up eating" / "to eat accidentally" depending on context. The analogy between English and Japanese here is likely coincidental, but it's amusing nevertheless.
- trealira 1y ago
  Funnily enough, this has resulted in people saying things like "見てみましょう" and "見てみてください", which confused me at first. But I suppose this is like non-native English speakers being confused by the extra "do" in phrases like "I already did do my work."

tsunamifury 1y ago

Try’n ta

Raj7k 1y ago

Why there are so many rules for speaking

foysavas 1y ago

The "and" in "try and..." may be a shorthand for the material implication of two temporal modal paths: "try and X" = can X -> must X = not can X or must X That said, the word "both" doesn't collocate before "try and X" because it instead pushes us toward an interpretation as logical conjunction: "both try and X" = can X and must X Likewise, despite the usage of "try not to", the phrase "try not and" doesn't show up, because under material implication the phrase becomes nonsense: "try not and X" = not can X -> must X = can X or must X

baobun 1y ago
OTOH "you mustn't try and X" sounds plausible, which tracks.

bsoles 1y ago

As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.

eaglelizard 1y ago
Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't. It also depends on the audience and medium, with "should've" being more appropriate for conversational/informal usage. It would be perfectly normal to say something like "he shouldn't've done that," but if I were writing a message, I'd at least expand the last contraction to "have." I think there's a general perception that many of the common dialects of American English, especially in the South and West, are associated with being less educated. I am not sure where that comes from. I'm a native English speaker, and my perception is that when someone speaks in a way where they don't use contractions, it seems verbose and stilted; I associate it with being scolded or disciplined, or when someone is speaking sternly to make a point (or out of anger). E.g.: "You don't know where you're going, you should've taken a left" - informative/neutral "You do not know where you are going, you should have taken a left" - critical/scolding Omitting contractions can result in speech that sounds strange and unnatural in general: "Shouldn't we go?" -> "Should not we go?" "Aren't you coming?" -> "Are not you coming?" "We didn't, but we should've." -> "We did not, but we should have."
- bendigedig 1y ago
  > Do you mean "should've"? That's a common contraction of "should" and "have." In many American accents, the difference between "should've" and "should have" is negligible, and will sound like "should of" even though it isn't. I think they specifically meant "should of" which is a colloquial form of "should've" in a number of places in the UK. I went to school with a large number of people who would write "I should of done X instead of Y". In fact I'm pretty sure I made that "mistake" a number of times growing up.

euroderf 1y ago

"try and" is a pet peeve of mine. "try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".

thfuran 1y ago
What’s your position on “finna”?
- euroderf 1y ago
  Never heard of it ! (Am from NE US.)

jagthebeetle 1y ago

This construction is similar to a hendiadys (which comes from the Greek for "one through two"); e.g. "nice and warm." (So says Fowler anyway.)

Sardtok 1y ago

It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial. This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form. I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.

Arn_Thor 1y ago
First thing I thought of when reading the linked post! You explained it for a non-Norwegian audience better than I could have too!
triyambakam 1y ago
Professor Faarlund might agree > In his 2014 paper "English: The Language of the Vikings" (co-authored by Joseph Embley Emonds), Faarlund and Emonds assert that English is a Scandinavian language (or North Germanic language) which was influenced by Anglo-Saxon (a West Germanic language) [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Terje_Faarlund
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  And in that case, "try and" is potentially very old and very "correct" English.
  - triyambakam 1y ago
    I don't disagree but I don't follow what you mean in response to Faarlund's theory?
    - hopelite 1y ago
      He may be referring to what I suspect too, that even though it is unlikely that any one Germanic language has the key to this, let alone the many similar linguistic mysteries, deeply diving into each of the languages to graph connections will likely provide the best chance at solving such things. I believe that not only do we have a hard time with this matter because our conception of what “try” means today is not original, but also that effectively “try and” and “try to” are effectively different concepts of the mind that we simply do not understand anymore, homographs whose separate original meanings and appropriate uses have been lost over time. I look forward to what LLMs will be able to unlock with this kind of historical and linguistic analysis. I think we will start unlocking some interesting this this way. I could see us being able to, to some degree, rewind linguistic history and also then apply it to historical context. Imagine an LLM that can not only graph all languages and meanings in those languages, but will also be able to infer meanings and origins going back into history by cross referencing all related languages … at least with some degree of accuracy greater than what we can do today. Now we just need all historical texts in digital form and to not erase all life on the planet.

bravesoul2 1y ago

> In dialects of Northeastern Canada, parallel inflected forms are acceptable: > 12) They tries and does that. There is a Ricky Jervais show https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) where the main character talks like this alot but not because that is common in the UK but perhaps to show he is a bit simple/slow. I think there is a danger in making that assumption about anyone based on the accent or general way they talk.

selimthegrim 1y ago

Surprised if they are quoting Dr Dre they don’t mention “run and…” (as in “run and tell that”)

throwmeaway222 1y ago

The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible.

drewbeck 1y ago
Descriptivism is much much older than 10 years but that is perhaps when you first became aware of it.
hackyhacky 1y ago
> The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible. Makes me wonder how people managed to speak English before they invented grammar rules. /s
sgentle 1y ago
When you say "allow"... what exactly do you imagine happening if Yale's linguistic department forbids people from using English in certain ways? Or is this more of a federal government thing? Grammar Force as the seventh branch of the US Military? What about other countries... are we thinking NATO or UN? Either way, gonna be tough to try and convince the Brits that US English is the correct one, since we didn't exactly get permission from them in the first place.

rezmason 1y ago

At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal. This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all

nine_k 1y ago
Why, "try and" could be like "try / finally", and "what all" could be filter(). I won't mind "await y'all" to await multiple promises.
- AlienRobot 1y ago
  What if... try { let x = parseInt(input); and { displayResult(x / 0); } } catch { displayError("Parsing error.") } And the catch can't catch a division by zero error because it occurred inside an "and" block.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    That's kind of like python's try/else, but not quite (the 'and' would be more general, if you can interleave them with statements in the try block)
  - sillysaurusx 1y ago
    In practice you can move the displayResult(x / 0) outside the try catch. It’s hard to think of a counterexample that comes up in practice. There might be something to this idea, because I’ve often been in situations where a try catch catches an error that originates a dozen frames down the call stack, which is sometimes (but not always) unrelated to the original point of the try catch block. People try and deal with this by adding more try catches around the code deeper in the call stack, but maybe there’s a better way.
nroets 1y ago
What is this JavaScript thing ? I guess I come from a different era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM

ziroshima 1y ago

It makes sense from a boolean perspective. E.g "I'll try and go to the store." If the try fails, you did not go to the store.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago
Only if your language has short-circuiting booleans.
petesergeant 1y ago
That’s just the meaning of “try” tho; “I’ll try to go to the store” is identical in meaning
- pnut 1y ago
  For that matter, "trying" is implied by "going", and you could just say "I'll go to the store".
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    Nah, there's a markèd difference in the expressed certainty there

kwoff 1y ago

"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos." Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.

jmbwell 1y ago

The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion. Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.” Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.” I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.

purplehat_ 1y ago
Interesting, where I’m from in southern california, “try and” doesn’t entail completion. (The article only mentions this for “go and”, which here does indeed entail expected completion.)
sssilver 1y ago
Doesn’t “try” imply possibility of failure to complete?
- zarzavat 1y ago
  "Could you wash the dog?" Is not a question asking whether the person is capable of washing the dog. It's a command phrased politely. "Try to wash the dog" "Try and wash the dog" If you had no prior information on whether the dog likes water or not, I'd say that the try-and version expresses a greater level of confidence that washing the dog will be successful, in other words it's a command. Whereas try-to could be read either straight (this task may fail) or as a command phrased politely.
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    The linguistic prescriptivist in in me cringes at "try and", but I recognize usage has moved on. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/were-going-to-explain-the-deal-with-try-and-and-try-to https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/were-going-to-explai...

hidelooktropic 1y ago

Reminds me of the incorrect "A whole nother"

vehemenz 1y ago
That's a quaint way of saying "another"—not appropriate for formal use—but not quite incorrect either.

GaryGapinski 1y ago

The use of "try and" is usually grammatically incorrect (when "try to" was meant).

dddgghhbbfblk 1y ago
Prescriptively, maybe. But it is certainly grammatical in the sense that linguists normally use. "Try and" sounds perfectly natural to my own ears and it is regularly used by native English speakers.

kazinator 1y ago

"try and <clause>" is syntactically correct. That is to say, > I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop. can be parsed as > I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop. which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them. It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence: > I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game". Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try": > Linguists, go ahead and fight me!

jameshart 1y ago
There's explanations in the article of why 'try and' can't be parsed as simply as that kind of parallel ellipsis structure. No reordering: You can't rephrase as I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop and try the way you can I'm going to watch the game and crack open a beer No use of both: You can't say I'm going to both try and change the course of Hip-Hop the way you could I'm going to both crack open a beer and watch the game No inflections: You can't say I have tried and changed the course of Hip-Hop the way you can I have cracked open a beer and watched the game

KurSix 1y ago

The syntactic quirks make it feel like a weird halfway point between coordination and some fossilized idiom

willyt 1y ago

‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.

mdcurran 1y ago
'Go put your shoes on' is sensical in British English. If I heard someone saying this, I wouldn't bat an eye.
- willyt 1y ago
  Yes, I would understand it and that’s probably what people naturally say informally where I live in Scotland and in other dialects it’s said more like ‘go’n put your shoes on’ where the ‘n’ is very soft. But especially if I saw it in writing I would assume that they were not a native British English speaker. It’s interesting. In America I presume it’s not grammatically correct to say ‘the police officer went got his gun and shot killed the suspect’ so why does US English drop the ‘and’ from go (and) or try (and)? Curious. (Edit with some observations about dropping letters from and)
- lpribis 1y ago
  'Go put your shoes on' is just another slightly different example of pseudo-coordination. I'm guessing that is has various levels of acceptance per-dialect (even within the UK) just like 'try and'.
vehemenz 1y ago
Both are "correct." I'm not saying this is why, but there are many dialects in British English, so it might be more difficult to pin down what is "correct" compared to American English.
- 1y ago

dataflow 1y ago

Hang on. Isn't "try and" just completely different from "try to"? "Can I leave work early?" "Try and see." This is at worst a threat, and at best telling the other person to just do it and ask for forgiveness later afterward than for permission beforehand. "Can I leave work early?" "Try to see." This is telling the person to go research the answer to figure it out properly. And it feels less natural to say it too. How can these be interchangeable in meaning? If anything they feel closer to being opposite in meaning here.

koakuma-chan 1y ago
I think your example shows [try] and [see], where as this article is about [try and] see.
nyeah 1y ago
Sure, but that's not the same use of the phrase. To me, "try and get some of those new fries" means more or less the same as "try to get some of those new fries". Maybe "try and see" is an exception to "try and ___".

itslennysfault 1y ago

This is also the construction used for FAFO FA = "try" (as a vulgar slang) When you de-vulgar/de-slang it it becomes: try and find out

varunneal 1y ago
I think this is a different construction. "And" in "try and find out" is acting as a conjunction, separating two different actions

lacoolj 1y ago

what about "I'll try better"?

deleted 1y ago

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