MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • Edit-preface: I am not a grammarian. I don’t know what the technical names for the different types of “to” are or if they are even recognized as distinct by experts in the field.

    English is does indeed use “go” to mean “go do a thing”, but not with directional “to” (as in “go to the library”).

    “Go run!”, “Go running”, “I’m going running”, and “I’m going to run” are all valid uses. (In that last case, the “to” is not a directional “to”, but is actually part of the infinitive verb “to run”, as in “I want to run”). However, you wouldn’t say “Go to run!” to tell someone to run.

    “Go to run” could make sense with a causal “to” (“Go, in order that you might run”) but that separates “go” and “run” in to separate actions. Causal “to” is the “to” in “push to open” and “press F to pay respects” this is not the “to” in “go to sleep”

    “Go to sleep” feels like it is in the directional sense, like “go to bed”

    Edit: Now you’ve got me thinking. “Go to sleep” and “go to bed” are a little unusual . “Go to [location]“ without an article is usually reserved for proper nouns or pronouns (“Go to France”, “go to Curicó”, “go to Walmart”, “go to John“ “go to her”). When the location is a general noun, you usually use an article or a proper/pro-noun in the possessive form (“go to a restaurant”, “go to the party”, “go to Bob’s house”, “go to your room”). So what makes “bed” and “sleep” so special? The only other case I can think of at the moment is “go to ground” and that is different because it is an idiom, and the rule for idioms is “they mean what they mean”

    Edit-edit: meals don’t use an article either: “to lunch”, “to dinner”, “to breakfast”.

    Edit-edit-edit: AAAAAH! It applies to some other prepositions too: “in bed”, “at lunch”; but not “under the bed”. What is going on‽

    Edit-edit-edit-edit: Causal “to” might be a use of the infinitive case?

    Edit-edit-edit-edit-edit: “go to work” does not use an article either.










  • The notion that “just because someone lived a long time ago, they must have been backwards, ignorant, or stupid” is one that needs to die a loud and public death. It is that line of thinking that leads people to believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, etc. because they are certain that folks back then weren’t clever enough to move large rocks about.

    He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.

    The History of Emily Montague, by Frances Brooke, 1769 (emphasis: mine)

    The use in the figurative sense isn’t valid merely because of “some rando uttering a word” a long time ago. It is valid because it continued to be utilized with that meaning for the next 250 years and is still used and understandable in that sense to this day.