Try and

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Usage and Nuance of “try and” vs “try to”

  • Many commenters treat “try and X” as effectively synonymous with “try to X” in everyday speech.
  • Others hear consistent nuance:
    • “try and” as more optimistic, committed, friendly, or encouraging;
    • “try to” as more formal, distant, hedged, or emphasizing difficulty.
  • In imperatives, some feel “try and catch me” is a playful dare, whereas “try to catch me” is a more neutral instruction.
  • A few argue “try and” implies success (“try and X and then do X”), while others insist that’s over-reading and that most speakers don’t systematically distinguish them.

Regional and Dialectal Patterns

  • In British English, “try and” (and “go and”) is widely felt to be standard and natural, especially in speech; some were even taught it as the “correct” form.
  • In American English, usage varies: common in the South and in AAVE, sometimes associated with informality or class, and a strong pet peeve for some speakers.
  • Scandinavian parallels are noted: Norwegian and Swedish have “and/to” pronunciation mergers producing similar-looking constructions; Danish has “prøv og…” colloquially.
  • Other cross-linguistic echoes appear (Japanese -te miru “try and see”, broader Scandinavian pseudo-coordination).

Syntactic / Linguistic Analysis

  • The linked Yale page frames “try and” as “pseudo-coordination”: it patterns like “and” but doesn’t behave like a normal coordination syntactically.
  • Key quirks: you generally can’t reorder the verbs, can’t precede with “both,” and can’t inflect both verbs (*“tried and go” sounds wrong in most dialects).
  • Some propose an underlying ellipsis (“try to X and see if you can X”), but others point out this doesn’t match known ellipsis patterns or all test cases.
  • There is debate over whether nuance like “entails completion” is real, regional, or just anecdotally perceived.

Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

  • Several commenters loathe “try and” (comparing it to “should of,” “irregardless,” “literally” as intensifier) and see it as symptomatic of decay or lack of education.
  • Others counter that linguistics is descriptive: if native speakers systematically use “try and,” it’s part of the grammar of those dialects, regardless of style guides.
  • “Correctness” is framed as context- and register-dependent (e.g., avoid “try and” in a formal cover letter, fine in casual speech).
  • Broader arguments surface about class and ethnic signaling, the role of language academies, and whether prescriptivism has any scientific standing.

Reflections on the Yale Project and Language

  • The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project is praised as a fun, systematic catalog of real-world quirks (e.g., “what all,” personal datives).
  • Some criticize the specific “try and” page for underplaying AAVE and Southern US data or over-focusing on historical written attestations.
  • Multiple comments broaden into philosophy-of-language: language as lossy encoding, mutual intelligibility as the real standard, and the inevitability of change.