The Old Man The Boat | Is It Correct

 The old man the boat | Is it correct?

As I promised in my last blog, I would try to give grammatical explanations of the five sentences I talked about there. By this time I believe that you are definitely aware of the fact that in order to write correct grammar you have to correct your sentences, and there’s no other alternative. So our very first priority is to give focus on the correctness of the sentences we write, don't we? And according to our last blog, being a teacher, you asked your students to write five sentences. Do you remember that? And on the basis of your question, one of your students wrote a sentence which was like this, “The old man the boat.” And your duty was to check whether the sentence was grammatically correct or not. Here I would like to share with you a very important secret. The above-mentioned student did not write the sentence on his own, he just stealthily copied the sentence from Wikipedia. The link is given for your information….https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

For those who did not read my previous article, I would request you to go through it. I am sure you will enjoy it too. On the test, one of the students wrote the above sentence. I hope you have already checked those five sentences and evaluated them as well. 

Now, in this article, out of those five sentences, I have decided to take only the first sentence and explain its grammatical aspects in detail. And as a result, the articles will not be too lengthy and it will be much easier for you to go through the content during your coffee break.

The five sentences were:

1. The old man the boat.
2. Yesterday morning Robert sat in a park bench for three hours and read his storybook.
3. He will have been driving the motor car for the past three hours.
4. I like French.
5. I like the French.

In this write-up let us discuss the first sentence. Your student writes this sentence in this way.  “The old man the boat.”


The Old Man The Boat | Is It Correct

https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-repairing-a-boat-9415006/

Do you think this is a grammatically correct sentence? Let’s see whether my explanation matches your expectation or not.

The explanation:

We all are very much familiar with the phrase ‘the old man’. In this phrase, the word ‘man’ is a common noun. And the man is described as ‘old’. Here the word ‘old’ is an adjective, and its function is to describe a noun or a pronoun. Usually, when we read something, we normally go with the normal flow; I mean, we like to consider the phrases the way we usually use them. And here, in this sentence, the writer very intelligently takes the advantage of our general thought process and tries to trick us, so that we could be misled. And not to mention, that the writer is successful in his attempt and achieves his goal. We know that the grammar rule says, if the definite article ‘the’ is placed before an adjective and the phrase describes a group or category, then the phrase behaves as a noun phrase. For example, ‘the rich’ means ‘the rich people, ‘the lonely’ means ‘the lonely people’ and similarly ‘the old’ means ‘the old people’, and they are all noun phrases.

Such as:

  • ·       The poor are neglected.
  • ·       Only the lonely are free.
  • ·       The old should be respected.

The next trick he played with us was the word ‘man’. Normally we consider the word ‘man’ as a common noun. But he intelligently used it as a ‘verb’. According to the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries ‘to man something’ means “to work at a place or be in charge of a place or a machine; to supply people to work somewhere”

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/man_2

And thus, the meaning of the sentence becomes “The old people work on the boat.” So, in this sense, this sentence is very much grammatically correct. 

Don't forget to leave your opinion below and please share with your friends if you like my content. Get ready for the next interesting topic. 🙏🙏



You May Also Like: 



“The old man the boat.” Is this sentence correct?

To Correct Your Grammar You Must Correct Your Sentence.

We all want to Correct our Grammar and Correct our Sentences

Correct Your Grammar    

Please let me know if you have got any suggestions or comments, and if you are generous enough please share these articles with your friends. 🙏🙏 

 



Grammar fanatic and a lifelong learner

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 17, 2022 at 9:52 AM

    The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Correct Your SentenceSeptember 17, 2022 at 1:42 PM

      I have already written a blog on it. The link is provide here https://correctyoursentence.blogspot.com/2022/09/to-correct-your-grammar-you-must.html you can get its grammatical explanation from Wikipedia. You can find the link in the article itself. Thanks for the comment! 🙏

      Delete

Post a Comment

Correct Your Grammar

The Fear of English | Correct Your Grammar

Image
  "Grammar Correction"  does produce  "Grammar Fear" https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-woman-sitting-at-the-table-4959781/ Dear Reader, Here are some of my bizarre problems with the fear of English and my experience with grammar correction. By the way, this is the very first post of my blog. To tell you the truth, I had a rough idea of what a blog was but never thought of writing one. Please allow me to tell you something about me. I am a lifelong learner of the English language. I am also afraid of the English language like many others who do not speak English. But by necessity, I also sometimes have to write in English. But the problem is that, by the time I finish writing a sentence, I am possessed by a strange fear of uncertainty. I begin to feel that there must be a grammatical error in the sentence. And this tendency to doubt started to grow rapidly from the moment I started reading about the questions and answers on Quora. I'm sure you all know that th...
Read more

Is it correct? | soup that eats like a meal

Image
Is it correct? Soup that eats like a meal Introduction : I'm sure you liked the phrase on the title and you're excited to know about it, but for your information, it's not a complete sentence. To make it a complete sentence, the definite article ‘THE’ should be placed at the beginning of the phrase. In other words, the complete sentence should be “ The soup that eats like a meal. ” But I think English speakers do not have any difficulty with the phrase. They know that there is an article at the beginning of the sentence and it is clearly understood; it does not matter to them. To tell you the truth, most English speakers don’t even know that ‘THE’ is called the ‘definite article.’ They know that ‘THE’ is needed in front of the phrase to make it natural sounding. But that is not my question. My question is whether the particular English sentence is grammatically correct or not. “ Is it right?”    Superfluous, but not useless: Now another question may arise here, ‘Do ...
Read more

English Shadowing | MAP

Image
English Shadowing: MAP Introduction: My dear reader, the title of the article that surprised you; or to put it more clearly, the specific word that made you interested in reading this article is “ map ”, right? First, let me tell you the full form of the acronym ‘MAP’. So, ‘MAP’ means: “ Mimic Authentic Phrases ” This can be discussed in detail later. The next part of the title is also interesting, isn’t it? This means that there is only one way to speak English. And that is; by following just this MAP, you will be able to speak English. The shadowing technique is quite easy and interesting.  It allows us to learn new things.  It helps us acquire a language.  With this continuous practice, we can't fail.  Shadowing is a great way to learn a language you want to say.  Just mimic the daily used common phrases that you hear every day.  By the way, you have to practice this skill every day. Speaking English is hard: Those of you who know English; o...
Read more

How Accurate Is Google Translate

Image
How Accurate Is Google Translate Dear friends, you may have already read about various statistical analyses of Google Translate accuracy on different big and famous sites. But here, in this article, you will come to know about my real-life achievement in using this Google Translate. And obviously, you will be able to know how much accurate Google Translate is. With only " Google Translate ", you can correct the grammatical error of any English sentence by yourself. And for that, you won't need an editor or proofreader. Dear reader, I hope you are well. The name of my previously published article was " Write English Easily with Google Translate and Grammarly ". For those of you who have not read my previous article, I highly recommend reading it; otherwise, you will lose a lot of valuable information. I did not exaggerate anything in my previous article. Based on my own experience, and everything I learned, I wrote there. And this article that I am going to pr...
Read more