linguoboy wrote:I don't understand the meaning of the second clause in this sentence. What about what other people have thought and said?
What I was trying to mean is that other people may think whatever they want, agree or disagree with quotes that they're reading in the book because that quotes are thoughts of some other people that were considered interesting and worth being written in the book. So those who don't like them have to admit them anyway.
Can we compare a comparative form of an adjective? I read about it on the internet and people said that one can't because a comparative adjective in itself has a form of comparing (that's why called so).
But I thought that maybe there could be instances where it's reasonable enough (or, at least, not incorrect) to indicate comparativeness even of such adjectives.
Here's the example that I thought of:
"I guess things went worse than you expected?"
"It could have been twice as worse had I retained my desire to start using those dangerous medications".
So the part that I'm talking about is in the second sentence. I think "twice as worse" is a comparison and we're used to seeing common forms of adjectives here: "twice as bad". But i think that the latter do not fully express the intended meaning. Can I consider the state of "being worse" than expected as something that might have been changed into even worse or a better state. Like "a little worse" than expected, "too much worse", etc. What do you think? Can you come up with a situation or a context where it would work or even a mere thought of it strikes your mind as utterly unidiomatic and incorrect?
In the Gary Moore song "Still Got the Blues" there's this sentence: "So many years since I've seen your face". When I listened to this song couple of years ago I didn't notice anything strange, maybe because I was less experienced. But now as I look at it, I find that I don't really understand why the perfect aspect is used in the present tense in the second part of the sentence. Don't you have the same feeling? I think that a pretty common structure of English sentences is: "It's been a period of time since something happened". I suppose that we can certainly rephrase the first part like this "It's been so many years", I guess the perfect is implied there but was omitted as obvious to save the size and rhythm.
So shouldn't the simple past be used here? It's like he "saw her face" and after that moment so many years have been (passed). I think that when we talk about a period of time in the present perfect that we need a moment to "push" our narrative from. and it's obvious that it should be an instantaneous action (a fact) in the past. Like:
"It's been five years since I entered this university".
"It's been four months since I first met her".
"It's been so many years since I bought this apartment".
And if we use the present perfect here it sounds quite strange, because there's no moment in the past that we count time from. So it sounds kind of paradoxical to me. What do you think?