I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
I almost see "try and" as a form of "manifesting", of optimism, of believing that you will succeed. This would sort of comport with what he's saying.
But any difference is subtle, and most native speakers won't notice it, beyond maybe the more formal register of "try to".
Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
But it doesn't mean that - it just means you will try which doesn't actually imply any level of action
This makes logical sense too, doesn't it? "Try and" implies success. I'm not actually saying "I'll try to get it done and I will get it done", if that was the case I'd skip the try, but I am evoking an idea in that direction.
- "try and" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from laziness / not actually attempting it
- "try to" implies that the reason for failure is slightly more likely to be from incapability
As in:
- I'll try and kill the mosquito... that has been annoying me all day
- I'll try to kill the mosquito... but it's quite hard to hit with this gun
But nobody would notice if you used the wrong one.
I agree with skrebbel's feeling about the phrase, and I think yours is also a little bit correct.
To add more character, I also think "try and" feels more casual and friendly. Less like a technical suggestion and more like a form of encouragement. More caring, less distance or annoyance.
"You should try and get some sleep. [I care about you, you poor thing.]" vs "You should try to get some sleep. [Why are you still awake?]"
There's more closeness with "try and" and more distance with "try to".
"Try to" feels formal, technical, distant. "Try and" feels comforting, compassionate, friendly, but definitely not something you'd use for a complex task.
I couldn't imagine "You should try and recalibrate your photon detector" ever being said.
> You should try and recalibrate your photon detector
I can totally imagine this, in a lab where all the equipment is old, and out of calibration, and the person saying it knows there are 10 other things that are more important, but this thing is still pretty bad and they feel obligated to point out the issue.
Whereas "try to calibrate" sounds to me like the process of calibration is quite hard and it's likely to end up no better calibrated than you started with.
If I say "I'm going to change that light bulb," I'm probably already getting up to fetch my toolbag.
If I say "I'll try and change that light bulb," I may be wondering whether I have a spare or a ladder or something else whose lack will interrupt the job, or in some other way doubtful of success: the implication is I expect I may come back and say something about the job other than that it's done.
If I say "Well, I might could try and change that light bulb," I probably don't mean in any particular hurry even to get up off the couch, and indeed may already be dozing off.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
The English language has so many little quirks. You can try to document them all, and it's a fun endeavor, but you can't try and document them all.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]
Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:
“What did you try and eat?”
* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”
There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:
*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”
What did you try ___ but spit ___ out?
The examples in the linked article, involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
You can't really reign in language.
As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.
Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.
[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...
[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.
[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386
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."
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
> Usually, coordinated verb phrases can be preceded by both:
> 9) Reality is Broken will both [stimulate your brain and stir your soul].
which would be a better example and clearer to me the first time if it didn't use two nouns ('stimulate and stir your soul').
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.
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".)
Imagine sitting listening to a lecture on quantum effects in biology or something similarly fascinating and someone in the audience obstructs because the lecturer said paetent not patent (or vice versa). Tediomania is awful..feel bad for those affected.
But register also matters. A communication is about much more than the surface meaning. It conveys a lot about the relationship between speaker and listener. Some languages formalize that grammatically, but it's present in myriad other ways.
Adhering to the arbitrary rules of correctness is one. Saying "try and" in a resume cover letter probably conveys a message of slackness and over-familiarity. Which might be a deliberate choice, but you're better off if you at least know you're making it.
Weirdly, that's not what this says. It specifically says you can't say this:
> * John will both try and kill mosquitos.
or
> * I tried and finished the assignment
or
> * Try always and tell the truth
What I'd say instead is: If native speakers say something, then it's grammatically correct. What you were taught is the "prescribed grammar" or "prestige grammar".
Also, grammar is voted on by speakers of a language. I'm generally against making fun of people for deviating from the prestige grammar; but I will "vote against" using the word "literally" to mean "figuratively" as long as I can.
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!
> try as you may/might
> try is my favorite word
> try harder
> try 1/2/3/…
> try, quickly!
Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?
Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.
And I am not even a native speaker.
But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
treetalker•2h ago
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)
quietbritishjim•1h ago