Just in case you’ve forgotten, modern English is a distributive language.  That means that it is the word order that determines the meaning of the sentence.  It matters:

Dog bites man.

Man bites dog.

 In Latin or any other inflected language, “man” and “dog” would have endings or other form changes that would tell you who was doing the biting and who was being bitten.  The order of the words would be much less important.

One word that gets misplaced often, especially in casual speech and writing, is “only.”  We say things like “I can only see my friends on Thursday,” when that’s not at all what we mean.

Consider:

I went to the store yesterday.

Only I went to the store yesterday.

I only went to the store yesterday.

I went only to the store yesterday.

I went to only the store yesterday.

I went to the only store yesterday.

I went to the store only yesterday.

I went to the store yesterday only.

Posted by Sharon under Observations | No Comments »