Author Topic: Verb at a sentence's tailend?  (Read 3919 times)

Miss Mae

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Verb at a sentence's tailend?
« on: November 13, 2014, 01:53:50 PM »
Hi! May you please explain the following sentence to me?

"Three examples do hardly a recipe for success make." ~Mireille Guiliano, French Women Don't Get Fat

I didn't understand the sense of make there...

Joe Carillo

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Re: Verb at a sentence's tailend?
« Reply #1 on: November 13, 2014, 10:38:38 PM »
Mireille Guiliano is actually using allusive poetic language that was in vogue during the Victorian period—a stylistic device used by some contemporary feature writers to give a literary touch to their stories. In that language, the verb in a negative construction doesn’t come after the adverb “not” but after the object of that verb instead. Clearly, the syntax of “Three examples do hardly a recipe for success make” is patterned after—or should I say attempts to mimic—that of the first line of the fourth stanza of the poem “To Althea, From Prison” by Richard Lovelace (1618-1658), which goes as follows:

Stone walls do not a prison make,     
  Nor iron bars a cage;   
Minds innocent and quiet take   
  That for an hermitage;   
If I have freedom in my love   
  And in my soul am free,     
Angels alone, that soar above,   
  Enjoy such liberty.


The normal syntax for those first four lines is, of course, as follows:

Stone walls do not make a prison,     
  Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take   
  That for an hermitage;

Note that the rhyme between “make” in the first line and “take” in the third line has been lost. From this, we can infer that the unusual syntax was used to achieve rhyme and meter in those lines of verse.

The same unusual syntax for a negative construction was also used in a Victorian-era English translation of a remark in Greek by Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE). It’s definitely more popular than the Lovelace poem and I’m sure that you’ve already come across it quite a few times in your readings. It goes as follows:

“One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does  not make a person entirely happy.”

See and feel the difference when that remark uses the normal syntax for negative construction:

“One swallow does not make a summer nor one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

The lilt, the pleasing rhythm of the original has somehow disappeared.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2014, 11:46:01 PM by Joe Carillo »

Miss Mae

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Re: Verb at a sentence's tailend?
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2014, 09:31:31 PM »
Thank you, Sir!