Timeline for What’s wrong with “After roasting the deer, the hunter extinguished the fire and then searched for a tree to hang it from”?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 29, 2014 at 7:51 | comment | added | Cees Timmerman | You can so hang fire from a tree. | |
| Apr 29, 2014 at 5:23 | comment | added | ADTC | Your answer gets to the heart of the problem. The sentence makes the assumption that the reader understands that it is not possible to hang a fire from a tree, hence automatically substitutes "it" with deer. Obviously this would fail in a sentence like "After roasting the deer, the hunter moved the stone and then searched for a tree to hang it from." Even worse: "After roasting the deer, the hunter left his cave and then searched for a tree to hang it from." (ESL people can mistake cave to mean a hand-held object.) | |
| Apr 28, 2014 at 21:09 | comment | added | Joshua Nurczyk | This becomes a bigger problem for people who don't have English as a first language, which is why in any proper writing you should avoid it. I'm a fluent English reader, and reading that sentence gives me pause, I'd hate to think of what someone coming from German or Russian (very different structures) would think. | |
| Apr 28, 2014 at 19:49 | comment | added | Kevin Fegan | The test question was not about the specifics mentioned in the question, but rather, it was about the construction of the sentence. As the question was given, it's clear that after some stumbling around, you can correctly identify what was meant. But substituting different words for the dear or the fire, etc, as in the example by Patrick M and others, the meaning is not so clear. So it's about reconstructing the sentence for the general case. | |
| Apr 27, 2014 at 23:24 | history | edited | bmargulies | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
deleted 2 characters in body
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| Apr 27, 2014 at 21:51 | history | answered | bmargulies | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
