On 2018 Dec 06 13:56:20, you wrote to me:

 AK>>  I always thought that every word means something. ;-)

 AH> Ideally, yes... but I understand George Bernard Shaw apologized for
 AH> writing a long letter on some occasion when (as he put it) he didn't
 AH> have time to write a shorter one.

that's always a good one :)

 AH> I can also see that if we're talking about having the Browns for
 AH> dinner we may need to make it clear we don't plan to eat them.  :-)

"Respectfully submitted for your perusal - a Kanamit. Height: a little
over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty
pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a
moment, we're going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a
Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the
Twilight Zone." - /To Serve Man/

 AK>>> Probably I could also say "invite her up for tea"
or "invite her
 AK>>> down for tea" or "invite her in for tea" ;=)

 ml>> this is true... english is a ""bit"" more
verbose than other
 ml>> languages...

 AH> Depends on what other languages one is comparing it to, I think.

true...

 AH> I gather you speak at least one or two I don't.

i used to speak Turkish (1st) and Japanese (2nd) but haven't since i was
maybe 5 years old...

 AH> As a Canadian, OTOH, I see many things written in both English &
 AH> French where the French version occupies more bandwidth because the
 AH> words are often longer & there are more of them....  ;-)

true... german is similar as well in that they put words together to make a
new one... at least, that's the way i understand some of what i've seen and
how it has translated...


 ml>>  the additional word, in this case, clarifies things a
 ml>>  little more than the bare phrase... you could clarify
 ml>>  even more by saying

 ml>>  invite her for tea on sunday.
 ml>>  invite her over to the club for tea.
 ml>>  invite her to the club for tea on sunday.

 ml>>  or similar... the additions just clarify more in most
 ml>>  cases that i can think of...


 AH> Yes, I can see inviting a person up or down if they live on another
 AH> floor of the same building or someone has to climb a hill.  I can also
 AH> see how if the club is like a second home to someone they might say
 AH> "over to the club" ... which in most such cases I know is
not very far
 AH> away from where they live. And if a friend appeared unexpectedly at my
 AH> door, I might invite them to "come (on) in".  While some of the
 AH> adverbs in the above examples may not be strictly necessary they add
 AH> clues about the geography &/or the level of formality.  :-)

yep... and then you get things like...

  i'm going to unthaw some chicken for dinner.
  hurry and finish washing up the dishes.

and similar... "unthaw" is the wrong word... should be
"thaw" or "unfreeze"... "up" is not needed in
the second one at all... can you "wash down", too? ;)

)\/(ark

Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin'
it wrong...
... If IBM invented Sushi, it'd be marketed as "Cold Dead Raw Fish"
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