One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake

Re:One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatic... by tankenmate on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:21AM (#8991200)

And you included my pet grammatical peeve; "try and". And so I favour the effort to try to keep the language regular; various English spellings notwithstanding.

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Re:One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatic... by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:31AM (#8991274)

Thank you! I'll try to do better.

A preposition makes more sense there. Which preposition could be argued. In New Zealand folks say 'he is different to us' instead of 'he is different from us'. One could imagine 'he is different by us' or 'he is different beside us' as correct somewhere.

Hm. Is 'try to keep' using 'to' in a prepositional sense? That's a slippery word.

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Re:One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatic... by pdpi on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:40AM (#8991334)

Pretty sure the 'to' there is a part of an infinitive. Replace it with a gerund and it becomes clear: "Try reading it upside down" vs "Try to read it upside down".

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Re:One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatic... by mathieuh on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:44AM (#8991377)

I think you should have a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

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