Timeline for What does 'Not to order' mean?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 3, 2012 at 14:25 | vote | accept | Naweed Chougle | ||
| Jan 31, 2012 at 9:43 | comment | added | Urbycoz | @Paul I think your interpretation is valid. However I've read and re-read the sentence many times now. And I suspect that if that is what the author was trying to say, she would more likely have left out the first comma. | |
| Jan 31, 2012 at 2:02 | comment | added | Paul Richter | I think the "exactly" is confusing some of us, yet we haven't explicitly defined its use. Let's do so. The sentence sounds like it could be a reply to the question "Have you ever written a book to order (i.e., because you were instructed to)?" And the answer is, rephrased: "No, I have never written a book because I was instructed to. But I have once written a book for a very similar reason: to please a particular audience." The phrase "not X, exactly" means "very similar to X, but essentially not X". | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 20:39 | comment | added | Marthaª | What @Henry said. | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 17:27 | comment | added | Henry | Urbycoz's first answer has this right. The "root" sentence would be "I have only once written a book to order"---i.e., written a book to someone's specifications. She clarifies, though, that even this wasn't exactly to order, but rather to please a particular audience (in some sense a milder version of writing a book to order). | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 15:20 | comment | added | Urbycoz | @Programming Enthusiast: I think you are probably best positioned to decide which is correct, since you have the context around the sentence. So I've appended Paul's interpretation to my answer. | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 15:19 | history | edited | Urbycoz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Jan 30, 2012 at 14:35 | comment | added | GEdgar | It is useful to have two differing opinions sometimes. | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 13:43 | comment | added | Naweed Chougle | @Urbycoz: I think I'd go with Paul Richter's comment. Do you feel you'd like to edit your answer? | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 12:16 | comment | added | Paul Richter | I would interpret 'not to order' here to mean that the author was not instructed or required to write it, she wrote it (for the girl) of her own accord. | |
| Jan 30, 2012 at 9:03 | history | answered | Urbycoz | CC BY-SA 3.0 |