Saturday, April 25, 2009
"Try and Remember A Time in September"
Consider this notice I saw posted recently:
"Be sure and remove your papers from the table before leaving the room."
"Oh," you say, "Is there something wrong with that sentence? Looks perfectly fine to me."
What does it mean?
"Um...is this is trick question? Because I think it means: make sure to pick up my stuff before heading out."
Well! If the writer had actually written "Make sure that you remove your papers..." that at least would have been correct grammar. Because, and here the grammar cop is almost reduced to tears, because there is no verb form in the english language that uses and as a substitute for to.
That's right. "...And remove" is completely meaningless in this sentence. The writer should have written "Be sure to remove....". Otherwise the sentence is really two ideas, one of which could be construed as redundant:
1. Be sure. This sentence is grammatically an imperative or a command to the reader to not be mistaken. Yes. Isn't that what "Be sure" means?
2. And remove your papers from the table before leaving the room. Since strictly speaking, no sentence can begin with a conjunctive, it would be better written as simply another imperative statement to "Remove your papers from the table before leaving the room." (Can you count how many times though I have committed that lapse in grammar here myself?)
So, what we really have here, in this crime against literacy, is a command to be sure, (but really we don't know what we are supposed to be sure of), and a command to remove your papers. I would argue that being sure is completely redundant and rather patronizing.
"But", you sputter, "I use that construct all the time in spoken english and it is universally understood by everyone I communicate with". There is only one way, I tell you, to construct an infinitive (which is how the sentence should be built) and that is with the root of the verb remove plus the word to.* The same applies to the use of "try and" and "go".
In case you think that my rantings would hold up in the high court of literacy, alas, it appears they would not, as suggested by Mark Israel:
"These colloquial constructions are synonymous, or nearly so, with "try to", "be sure to", and "go and" respectively, those equivalents being undisputedly acceptable in both formal and informal style. They are syntactic curiosities in that they can only be used in conjugations identical to the infinitive: we can say "to try and do it", "try and do it" (imperative), "I'll try and do it", "if I try and do it", and "he did try and make the best of it", but not "if he tries and does it" or "he tried and did it" with the same sense."
And Bartelby lets us know that:
"For generations, commentators have criticized try and, as in I’ll try and see her tomorrow, preferring try to in such constructions. Both have been in constant use throughout the period, however, and the main difference is that try and is almost always limited to Casual and Impromptu levels and their written imitations, whereas try to is Standard, appropriate at all levels."
I suggest that you be the judge of this matter for I have become weary of the fight.
*****
*From http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/verbs.htm
Infinitive: the root of a verb plus the word to. To sleep, perchance to dream. A present infinitive describes a present condition: "I like to sleep." The perfect infinitive describes a time earlier than that of the verb: "I would like to have won that game."
