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The following paragraph is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times entitled “Is North Korea a Nuclear Threat or Not? The President Now Says It Is” published on 22 June 2018:

“They [Trump’s supporters] said that by talking with Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump was going to start World War III,’” Ms. [Lara] Trump said. “And yet here we are on the cusp of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula,” she said, adding, “They won’t try and stop a loser, but they will try and stop a winner.”

What does the construction “They won’t try and stop a loser, but they will try and stop a winner” mean?

tchrist
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Fujibei
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  • Lara says D.T. is winner. Don't know who the loser is though. – Boondoggle Jun 23 '18 at 01:47
  • You will need to clarify what it is that you don't understand. Which word do we have to explain? "Loser"? "They"? "Stop"? "A"? "Will"? "Won't"? All of these strike me as exceptionally basic. Please elaborate. If this is a question about "try and do", as the current answer interprets it to be, then it's a duplicate. As well as general reference. – RegDwigнt Jun 23 '18 at 12:38
  • @RegDwigнt I took the question to be referring to the tall poppy syndrome due to the contrast between winner and loser. – Lawrence Jun 23 '18 at 13:24

1 Answers1

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You raise and interesting question: it highlights an important distinction between what is acceptable in informally spoken or perhaps even ‘tweated’ English and what is acceptable in written English, and indeed in spoken English, other than where the speech is an off the cuff response to a question, as in this case.

I should be shocked to read this casual usage in thE NY Times except as a quotation, as in your case.

In effect, Lara has substituted the conjunction ‘and’ for the subordinating conjunction ‘to’. We all know Lara is trying to say something that makes sense (grammatically, at least). It is obvious that It is the infinitive that is intended. We are used to this colloquialism and understand what she is saying.

Some may even sneer at her lack of education, but that would be unfair. This was off the cuff under pressure. As such, it is a very common colloquialism. It is so familiar that we do not even have to think about it.

If we did, we should see that grammatical analysis breaks down.

They don’t try and they don’t stop a loser.

This is nonsense, of course. Moreover, ‘try and stop can only work in the future or the imperative. You cannot say

They tried and stopped the burglar but he got away.

But the burglar could say

Just you try and stop me and see what happens.

Tuffy
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    The bit about past tense is interesting and rarely pointed out. I would be careful throwing around the word "nonsense", though. "Try and stop" is exactly as nonsensical as "I'm on the bus" or "she's married with three children" or "my father broke a leg when he was five". All of these are utter nonsense but we went and agreed that they are not, and so now they are not. And so everyone uses them because everyone knows what it is that we've commonly agreed upon for them to mean. (That's how all of language works, really. The word "cat" only means something because we agree that it does.) – RegDwigнt Jun 23 '18 at 12:34
  • @RegDwigнt Very neat and wittily expressed. You are right. Upvoted. – Tuffy Jun 23 '18 at 13:00
  • The paywalled OED gives as sense 16b for the verb try: “16. b. Followed by and and a coordinate verb (instead of to with infinitive) expressing the action attempted. colloq.” The earliest provided citation is from 1686, but this is still the OED2 entry; they haven’t yet updated it for the third edition. – tchrist Jun 23 '18 at 13:07