I was reading through a brief response by Erin Brenner to Bill Walsh’s contention that the try and X construction should be opposed. (You know, like “I’ll try and write a new post sometime soon.”) Walsh’s basic point:
“‘I have to enforce this peeve,’ [Walsh] said. ‘You try to do something. To try and do something is to (a) try to do it, and (b) do it, which is not the intended meaning of the phrase.’
And Brenner’s:
The problem I have with Walsh’s reasoning is that try and is an idiom. There’s no point in trying to make sense of an idiom’s grammar; an idiom has its own unique (‘peculiar,’ says the American Heritage Dictionary) grammar. It doesn’t have to make literal sense.”
I agree with Brenner here. Sure, try and X doesn’t seem to make much sense.* But it doesn’t matter if it makes sense; if we’re trying to study language, we don’t get to say “I don’t understand this data” and throw it away. We’re stuck with the fact that people say and write try and X (the OED even offers an example from Paradise Regained, and Google Books has one from 1603) and it feels natural to most people.
When Walsh says that “To try and do something is to (a) try to do it, and (b) do it”, it’s clear what he’s getting at, but he’s wrong because that’s not what it means. What it means is what people use it to mean, and people overwhelmingly use it to mean (approximately) “try to do something”. That’s how language works; if everyone thinks a construction means X, then it means X.
It’s a similar problem with could care less, which people exasperatedly complain should be couldn’t care less. Of course it “should”. But everyone understands could care less to mean what it’s used to mean (with the possible exception of non-native English speakers and obstinate native speakers). And whenever most everyone agrees on what something means, whether it be a word or a phrase or an idiom, that’s right, no matter how illogical it seems.
That might sound weird. But if we’re going to treat language as something to be studied, as a science, then that ties our hands a bit. Quantum mechanics is a hot mess, and it sure would have been easier if it were Newtonian physics all the way down. But physicists don’t get to say, “nah, that’s crazy, let’s just keep using Newtonian models.”** Taxonomists don’t get to say “nope, platypuses are too strange, we just won’t classify them.” And so on.
![[Psyduck]](https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/054psyduck.png?w=490 "054Psyduck")
Thankfully, taxonomists don’t have to classify Psyduck.
You can have an unassailable argument for why we shouldn’t be able to get the meaning out of a word or phrase or construction, but if everyone understands it, your argument is wrong. This is an essential fact of language. There are rules in language, but if the language itself breaks them, then it’s a shortcoming of the rule, not of the language.
So what can we say about try and? We can try to put together an explanation for how the unexpected meaning arose, looking at possible ancestries for it, possible analogical routes that might have spurred it. We can classify where and when and how it’s used (it’s generally informal, for instance). But when it comes time to figure out how it makes sense, it could well end up that all we can do is throw up our hands, call it an idiom, and move on. After all, what’s really interesting about language (at least for linguists) is the higher-level stuff like phonology or syntax or computational psycholinguistics; idioms are just the charming baubles that catch our eyes.
Of course, none of this means that one can’t be against an idiom — only that its supposed illogic is one of the weakest reasons to oppose it. I don’t have a problem with Walsh correcting try and in situations where it’s inappropriate or likely to cause confusion (e.g., formal writing or writing directed at an international audience). I do the same with non-literal literally, not because it’s confusing or incomprehensible or uneducated or new — it’s not — but because it feels cheap and hyperbolic to me, especially when used regularly. But these are stylistic choices, not grammatical ones. They aren’t returning logic to language.
—
*: It makes a little bit more sense when you think of the construction as an analogue of come and X or go and X, and realize that and in this situation is indicating dependence between the attempt and the action rather than simultaneity. The seeming noncompositionality of the construction may be in part due to language change, as the MWDEU notes that various related constructions (e.g., begin and) were common in the past, and thus when try and emerged, the dependent sense of and may have been more productive. In fact, the MWDEU hypothesizes that try and may predate try to.
**: Of course, they can do this when they’re staying at macroscopic scales, where quantum effects are undetectable — and thank God for that, or I’d’ve never survived college physics classes.
Motivated Grammar 
26 comments
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June 7, 2012 at 11:32 am
Stan
I agree: “try and” is fine (and has been for centuries), though it’s not considered suitable in many formal contexts. As I said in a comment to Cathy Relf’s recent post about the idiom, “try and” and “try to” sometimes differ in meaning, but where they are synonymous the main difference is one of register.
The claim that “try and do something” necessarily breaks down into two parts, (1) trying and (2) doing, seems to require wilful misreading of something that makes immediate and obvious sense to just about everyone all the time. When the phrase could lead to genuine ambiguity or confusion – I suspect this happens very occasionally – then we would just choose an alternative or clarify our meaning on the spot.
This is great.
June 7, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Jonathon
I’ve probably said this before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but one important thing linguistics has taught me is that if you conclude that something shouldn’t work the way it does, you’ve missed something important in your analysis.
The problem here is the assumption (or insistence) that and only functions as a logical connector. But a frank appraisal of the facts requires us to admit that it’s much more slippery than that.
To be honest, I think an awful lot of prescriptions require willful misreading. In terms of pragmatics, it throws out illocution (the speaker’s intended meaning) and perlocution (the listener’s received meaning) and insists on a rather narrow reading of the locution itself as the only possible meaning.
June 7, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Daniel
I’d just like to echo Stan’s compliment of the statement “There are rules in language, but if the language itself breaks them, then it’s a shortcoming of the rule, not of the language.” If one was asked to explain the central tenet of descriptivism in 25 words or less, one would be hard-pressed to do better than that.
June 7, 2012 at 3:53 pm
the ridger
I believe Fowler calls “try and” hendiadys.
At any rate, idioms are vocabulary, in my opinion, not syntax.
June 7, 2012 at 5:54 pm
Emily Michelle
Have you ever heard the David Mitchell’s Soapbox about “could care less”? (It’s on YouTube, if you ever want a listen.) He claims it’s an Americanism and rants rather entertainingly about it for several minutes. While it’s amusing, it annoys me because he is, to use a phrase from other commenters, willfully misreading the phrase, partly to be funny and partly because he’s often a good example of the “obstinate native speaker.” If I ever meet him in person, I’m going to direct him to this excellent post.
(And lest anyone think I’m speaking ill of David Mitchell, he’s quite hilarious and has a number of really good Soapboxes about language, including my favorite, Authenticity, in which he discusses how being overly aware of his language all his life has led him to forget how he speaks when he’s not over-correcting himself.)
Also, I’d like to second (or third, I suppose) the excellent phrase that Daniel and Stan complimented, and to say that I would absolutely love to have that on a t-shirt so I could point to it when people were being sticklers.
June 8, 2012 at 1:11 am
Eugene
I concur with both the idiomatic analysis and also the pragmatic approach – it means what speakers mean when they say it (or is that the Humpty Dumpty Principle).
However, I think the first asterisk makes the most salient point. To try and to do are a natural sequence of events. If you focus on the ‘effort’ part of the meaning of try (and ignore the common entailment of failure), you get a meaning of to complete an action at some expense of effort.
I tried, and I succeeded. What’s so odd about that?
June 8, 2012 at 1:14 am
Eugene
One more thought. We should be somewhat grateful to the people who pay enough attention to these things to express their peeves in print. It makes for good blog topics.
June 8, 2012 at 10:58 am
Abbie (@zeroanaphora)
Hmm, what exactly separates “idioms” from normal syntax? Is syntax just “stuff we can formulate rules for”, and idioms “stuff we can’t”? Are we sure there’s any fundamental difference?
June 8, 2012 at 4:33 pm
nosedog
I don’t mind your defence of “try and”. It’s informal, it’s familiar, and it even has a little logic behind it, as you point out in the footnote. But “could care less”? OK, so it’s an idiom, and I know idioms aren’t amenable to literal analysis, but saying the direct opposite of what you actually mean just sounds ignorant. The problem with “could care less” isn’t grammatical: there is nothing wrong with its grammar whatsoever. The problem is … well, obvious.
I don’t mean to say everyone who says “could care less” is ignorant: it’s clearly an enculturated verbal tic. But people who care about language shouldn’t defend it.
June 9, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Ray Girvan
@Jonathon: “To be honest, I think an awful lot of prescriptions require willful misreading.”
Absolutely. For example, I never believe the people who claim they genuinely misunderstand the “double negatives” used for emphasis in dialect/sociolect: the kind who claim they actually understand, say, “I don’t want no sugar” to mean “I want sugar”. It’s just wilful misunderstanding to make a point.
It would be an interesting to put one of these people in a room with two glasses of water, glass A poisoned and glass B not, and told they were to drink one after receiving truthful information about the contents. That information would come from a folksy character saying of A, “You don’t want to drink none of that” and of B, “There ain’t no poison in that”. I guarantee none of the subjects would drink from A.
June 13, 2012 at 7:10 am
Mar Rojo
Gabe, it seems that most everyone believes we can only use ‘less’ with uncountable nouns, for example. Does that make it right?
June 13, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Jenny
I think that I use both “try to do” and “try and do” interchangeably in speech. But, though many would usually write “try and do,” that’s not what it is. It’s “try’n’do” which is nothing more than a phonetic simplification of “try to do”. When translating “try’n’do” to a written format, I would probably write “try to do” most of the time (because that’s what I’m saying), but it winds up being written “try and do” because that’s the word sequence it most closely resembles phonetically. In the spoken trade-off between speed and accuracy, I think “try to do” (for me) comes off a little too ennunciated, maybe even a little stuffy (depending on the speaker). It doesn’t feel very natural to me (most of the time). It’s so difficult to figure out what it is you actually do in a natural setting (given our prejudices about languages and what we feel we want to do v. what we do), but I really think that’s how it works for me. When I hear someone say something like, “I’m gonna try’n go to the park this weekend,” I think that my internal sternographer is typing, “I’m going to try to go to the park this weekend.”
My point is, in relation to this post, is that I think it’s a fallacy to even think that people are saying “try *and*….” It’s actually more like it’s own thing, like try’n is a form of the phrase “try to.” I think this supports Gabe’s argument that it’s not something that can be put through a mathematical logic test. This happens a lot in language, though, where something in a spoken form gets translated into what it most seems to resemble in written form, and the argument against it’s use comes not from the fact that there was anything wrong with it, but when we try to write it, we don’t really know how to (because we have no word /n/, so there’s either something logically wrong with it (and), or phonetically wrong with it (to), or wordily wrong with it /n/.
June 14, 2012 at 4:17 am
Eugene
Greenbaum and Quirk discuss ‘try and VERB’ in a short section on Pseudo-coordination along with ‘go and VERB’ and also ‘sit and VERB.’ I think pseudo-coordination means that these are not two events but different aspects of one event.
What we have here is two different construals of a situation. The ‘try to’ construction is grammatically tighter, but the semantic difference is slight.
I agree with the previous comments regarding the phonological reduction of ‘and’ in ‘try ‘n’ but the same would apply to the ‘to’ in ‘try tə.’
Generally, it’s OK to have two ways to say (nearly) the same thing.
July 8, 2012 at 5:59 am
Vera Surkova
As a non-native, sometimes I need to figure out what I’ve heard and do some post-processing for the phrases that I’m likely to have misunderstood.
“Try to” and “try and” is this kind of phrase. When English was the only foreign language I knew, every time I should have consulted a dictionary or a reference book. Now I’m more or less comfortable with Swedish which is also a Germanic language, and I should say that the Swedes do exactly the same thing. There’s a whole load of verbs that take infinitive which starts with “att” in Swedish (corresponds to “to” in English). Most Swedes pronouce “att” as “å” (sounds like “o”). On the other hand, we have “och” meaning “and” which is also pronounced as “å” by the majority. Thus the picture is pretty much the same: Swedes themselves cannot figure out what they’ve just said, was it “try to” or “try and” (försöka att/försöka och).
August 20, 2012 at 8:47 am
Another take on “try and” vs. “try to” - Writing for Business - A Whatis.com Blog
[…] I wasn’t particularly looking for a contrary opinion yesterday, when I was writing about “try and” vs. “try to.” As a matter of fact, when I found the post discussing “try and,” I noted it and then mostly ignored it. But I returned to it today and want to share it with you. The post is entitled “If everyone says it, it can’t be wrong.” […]
October 2, 2012 at 1:19 pm
linguischtick
Very nice! I’ve made the same argument myself. And why is it even considered a serious reply to say “that doesn’t make sense”? Language is fundamentally arbitrary – literally nothing has to make sense. Why pick on this particular thing? What about beat a dead horse. What kind of sense does that make? Why not stigmatize it? While we’re at it, I’m pretty ticked off that people use voiceless fricatives to mark plurality. That has nothing to with plural!
November 29, 2012 at 2:44 am
mick white
I understand Walsh’s interest in this lttle bit of grammar. “try and do something”.
In my (Australian) English dialect, “try and do” is less formal than “try to do” – “try and do” is more spoken speech than written speech.
March 10, 2013 at 11:51 am
microgirl
Regarding “could care less”, which you imply is used by all normal native English speakers – eh…no, no it’s not. Most indubitably not.
And Emily, who goes on about David Mitchell “claiming” it’s an Americanism….. That’s because it bloody is!
Every non-North American native speaker of English – including, y’know, the English – says “couldn’t care less”. I’m not getting into an argument of whether it’s right or wrong – as you say, it’s idiom and is therefore “correct” in its natural habitat, but it most certainly does not make any sense whatsoever, and in fact is saying the exact opposite of what the speaker is intending. Unlike, say, the other Americanism of “If I would have…..then I would have…..” which truly, genuinely, honest to God makes no grammatical sense whatsoever. I can’t even fathom where it came from, how such an idiomatic usage arose. It’s mindboggling. (eg “If I would have needed to go to the toilet before I left I would have gone.”)
Now, before anyone retaliates I know that even British English has it’s grammatical/idiomatic nonsensities (‘aren’t I’, anyone) and I still argue that that’s incorrect English, although it is obviously absolutely correct in its habitat (In Ireland we say ‘amn’t I’) ;-) It was just the “native speakers” and “claims” bits that got my goat ;-)
I’ve often found a handy way of distinguishing technically correct English from that which is accepted as correct in everyday usage is to think what would you teach in a TEFL class? Lots of times I’ve had to explain to a learner of English that X is right in Ireland, it’s the way we say it here, but that strictly speaking it’s not actually proper English and they probably shouldn’t use it anywhere else ;-)
March 10, 2013 at 1:48 pm
nosedog
Well put, microgirl!
March 16, 2013 at 2:48 am
Dan M.
microgirl, do you have any data that supports your claim that “could care less” is an Americanism? Looking at some actual data indicates the opposite.
Occurrences of “could care less” and “couldn’t care less” in Google’s British corpus: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=could+care+less%2Ccouldn%27t+care+less&year_start=1930&corpus=6
and the same for the American corpus: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=could+care+less%2Ccouldn%27t+care+less&year_start=1930&corpus=5
Not only did America’s adoption of “couldn’t care less” lag several years behind Britain’s for for almost thirty years, it wasn’t until 1964, 22 years after the introduction of “could care less”, that the American use of that second phrase exceeded the British use of it.
April 21, 2014 at 3:30 am
Everybody put down the switchblades. English changes, and that’s okay. |
[…] English—it’s always changing. And if everyone uses and understands a certain construction, we can’t very well call it “wrong,” at least in less-formal […]
April 27, 2014 at 4:16 am
Richard
“if everyone thinks a construction means X, then it means X.”
Yeah, if it’s literally EVERYONE. Trouble is, some people don’t think it means x and Bill Walsh is one of them, with a plausible justification to boot. Where this distinction becomes more obvious is perhaps in legal contracts: it matters less what the average person thinks some constructions mean than what they literally mean, in such cases.
If I’m writing a legal contract I’m damned well going to be careful about making a distinction between “try to” and “try and”.
Another problem here is that idioms have origins and thus, reasons for their existence. Clearly, the expression “red herring” is not a mere lazy bastardization of “distracting or misleading irrelevancy” or anything like that. But the expression “try and do” sounds suspiciously a LOT like “try to do”, except that it’s slightly less work to enunciate, and when mumbling, “try to” all but becomes “try n’ ” (n and d being very proximal glottal stops) and in spoken english “n” means “and”). So it’s pretty easy to guess where “try and” derived from, and why.
Other than an as a ponderously mumbling pronunciation or mishearing of “try to”, it would never have existed in the first place. And since it means precisely the same thing as its (probable) precendent, then I don’t blame prescriptivists for suggesting that one is correct, the other, just a popular mistake. Which unfortuantely does have an alternate (popularly “alternative”) literal meaning of “both try to do something, and also do it” which, while unconventional, is a valid construct for expressing precisely that.
At best, it can be argued to have two possible meanings and descriptivists can say that people using the expression “try and” usually appear to be using it to mean “try to”. Not because using it to mean “try, and also do” is wrong, but because there’s usually less reason to be bothered conveying that someone intends to both try to do, and do something. If they intend to do it, it stands to reason they’re also going to try.
Incidentally, if “try and” means “try to”, then what’s the past tense of that construction?
Someone tried and explained that one to me once but at that point the idiom fell apart. Pretty inflexible idiom, isn’t it? I wonder why.
Interestingly, in its past tense, “Tried to” involves barely 2/3 the lingual contortions that “tried and” does. Maybe that’s why people have only ever learned to screw up the present simple of “try to” but they managed to leave the past alone.
I reckon an idiomatic verb expression (or any verb expression) isn’t very impressive if it doesn’t even have a past form.
That’s worse than Japanese where they use the same construction for both present and future. (Pity their lawyers.) To completely run out of options for the past and have to revert to some other verb phrase to get it across seems pretty pathetic. Contrast with any similarly common idiomatic verb phrase that really is legit, like “drive me crazy” for example. Easy to conjugate:
This drives me crazy. It drove me crazy. It’s going to be driving me crazy all week. Had it not driven me crazy, I might have gone along with my knee-jerk first assumption that if anything is popular, it’s correct.
That having been said, I don’t mind “try and” as an informal version of “try to”. As spoken English, provided it’s not part of formal agreement like a binding verbal contract, then no problem.
April 27, 2014 at 4:21 am
Richard
P.s. Nobody ever says “I’m trying and explain why this is a legitimate idiomatic expression” etc. either. Far as I know. Nor is there any “We’d have tired and… if we’d even though it were possible”.
Stick a fork in it. This fake idiom is done.
April 27, 2014 at 4:36 am
Richard
Jenny, I almost agree with everything you wrote up to but not including your belief that “…this supports Gabe’s argument that it’s not something that can be put through a mathematical logic test.” Is this an echo chamber? I have mad respect for Gabe from his posts but I think your breakdown of the phonetics couldn’t be a more direct support of Bill Walsh’s point that “try and” is a mistake because as you said, that’s not even what people are saying when they say it.
Personally I wouldn’t go that far though. I think people really are saying “try and” because they’ve heard other people say “try ‘n'” and mistook it for “try and”, and then, well, they start imitating it and it spreads until eventually it becomes standard, although as I pointed out, it’s still got a long way to go (other tenses).
Some idiom. I guess any old sloppy habit counts as an, like, idiom, now.
October 4, 2015 at 6:07 am
Tony F.
Richard, thank you for your posts. I especially liked the part about using “try and” in the past tense, which does, as you note, sound even MORE ridiculous than using it in the present.
I can’t believe the beginning of this section: :If everyone says it, it can’t be wrong,” which suggests an inability to think for oneself and to follow the herd of sheep over the cliff because they’re all doing it. Additionally, not everyone says it. I don’t. I say “try TO,” because when I try to do something, I am attempting TO do it. I am not doing something nebulous like trying, and then doing something in addition to “trying.”
The herd instinct is all that’s in play here — “everyone does it, and I don’t want to look fussy or different, so I’ll just follow along.”
It’s try TO.
March 15, 2017 at 1:31 pm
Everybody put down the switchblades. English changes, and that’s okay. | Dragonfly Editorial
[…] English—it’s always changing. And if everyone uses and understands a certain construction, we can’t very well call it “wrong,” at least in less-formal […]