may just have yet to upload or may just have not uploaded yet

Question

I am trying to decide between

"may just have yet to upload" or "may just have not yet uploaded"

Is one preferable to another technically (not just opinion).

It's for a paper I'm writing. I guess I was asking if there was any grammatical reason for preferring one over the other — Sam Weisenthal, Commented Feb 19, 2015 at 20:04
I meant could you provide the surrounding sentences, to give that some context? That way we can better understand if there's a better way to write it. — andi, Commented Feb 19, 2015 at 20:09
The have yet to VP idiom has very restricted syntax. If you're not familiar with it, don't use it. — John Lawler, Commented Feb 19, 2015 at 20:16

rhetorician · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-20 01:29:22Z

3

Neither is preferable, to be honest.

Simply, simplify, simplify. I suggest either

"It may have yet to upload."

Or,

"It may not have uploaded yet."

Sentence one sounds a bit hoity-toity. Sentence two sounds less snooty and would likely be more common in everyday parlance. The choice is yours.

answered Feb 19, 2015 at 20:05

rhetorician

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I can see that you might want to use upload intransitively sometimes, but surely anything that can be uploaded can't carry out the action of uploading -- a person or automated system uploads data. So I would go for the passive, but still drop the "just" - "it may have yet to be uploaded" or better "it may not have been uploaded yet"
– Chris H
Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 8:42
@ChrisH: Good point. You may want to forgive me, as I'm computer-lingo challenged; but hey, I'm learning!
– rhetorician
Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 16:28
No problem at all, it's just my opinion. You've got the right point and it's more than possible I'm being old-fashioned anyway.
– Chris H
Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 19:40

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