Is this sentence correct?

[andytruong1202]

Dear Sir/Madam,

Is the below sentence correct?

"Always show respect to you betters"

Thanks,
Andy

 

[Roman55]

I am not a teacher.

No, there is a mistake.

Try starting the sentence with "I" and you will understand what the mistake is.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I don't know what "I" will do there, but "you" should be "your".

 

[emsr2d2]

I am not a teacher.

No, there is a mistake.

Try starting the sentence with "I" and you will understand what the mistake is.

There is no reason to add "I" to the start of this sentence. It is an imperative. Mike has pointed out the one error. Well, there is another error - the sentence doesn't end with a full stop.

 

[Rover_KE]

Roman was rightly encouraging Andy to discover the mistake for himself.


Andy, please note that a better title would have been Always show respect to you betters.

Extract from the Posting Guidelines:

'Thread titles should include all or part of the word/phrase being discussed.'

 

[emsr2d2]

Roman was rightly encouraging Andy to discover the mistake for himself.

I realised that but I couldn't see how adding "I" to the start of the sentence was going to help the OP spot a spelling error later in the sentence.

 

[Roman55]

There is no reason to add "I" to the start of this sentence. It is an imperative. Mike has pointed out the one error. Well, there is another error - the sentence doesn't end with a full stop.

I am not a teacher.

I am surprised by this. I was under the impression that you preferred learners to work things out for themselves rather than just have answers given to them, especially when they are first time posters.

When Rover_KE correctly interpreted the meaning of my post you said, "I realised that but I couldn't see how adding "I" to the start of the sentence was going to help the OP spot a spelling error later in the sentence." How did you know it was a typo? Even if it were, starting the sentence with "I" would make that clear just as it would make clear the error in the choice of personal pronoun. Perhaps you were influenced by post #3.

 

[emsr2d2]

I was influenced by nothing. I read post #1 in full before looking at any of the responses. I read it as an imperative, with a misspelling (or error) of "your" later in the sentence. Had I been the first responder, I would have asked the OP to reread the sentence and check every single word very carefully to see if they could find the error. There was no point posting that as a response containing the answer had already been given.

 

[MikeNewYork]

I still don't see what adding "I" to the sentence has anything to do with the error. For me, it was more likely to confuse the OP than to assist him/her. Adding "I" just makes it a different sentence. If the OP then changed "you" to "my" it still would not have answered the question.

 

[Roman55]

I am not a teacher.

Of course you don't. You never do.

It doesn't have anything to do with the error, it has everything to do with making the error obvious.

It was only a suggestion.

I stupidly thought that "I always show respect to you betters." would sound so wrong that the error would stand out.

 

[MikeNewYork]

There is no reason to take this personally. You often do that.

If you wrote an imperative sentence with an error and someone told you to change it by adding "I", what would you think?

 

[emsr2d2]

I am not a teacher.

Of course you don't. You never do.

It doesn't have anything to do with the error, it has everything to do with making the error obvious.

It was only a suggestion.

I stupidly thought that "I always show respect to you betters." would sound so wrong that the error would stand out.

I understand that but we native speakers frequently think that an error must sound really obvious to everyone, including learners. We are frequently wrong. What I don't understand is why you thought that "I always show respect to you betters" somehow makes the error with "you" more obvious. Both sentences (with and without "I") have exactly the same error but completely different meanings. If the OP had realised that "you" was wrong, they would have corrected it in the first place.

However, we have drifted off track here. The fact is that most of the time, we encourage learners to work out what the error is themselves. This is one of the rare occasions when they were given the answer early on in a thread.

I fear our exchanges might well be confusing the OP more and more at this stage. In the absence of any response at all from the OP so far in this thread, we have no way of knowing yet whether it was a typo or an unspotted error.

Can I suggest we all hold fire now until we have heard from the OP?

 

[Barb_D]

As a side note, I know I feel uncomfortable with this idea of "your betters."

As an American, I know others might have more money than I do, and more social standing, but they are not "my betters" and I would have no interest in showing them any respect unless they showed they merited it by their actions, not the family they were born into or their bank account balance.

I have less trouble with "your elders."

 

[emsr2d2]

In BrE, it's rare to hear "betters" on its own. Generally, it's "your elders and betters". Even then, it's not used particularly frequently. Like Barb, I show respect to people I believe deserve it, based on their actions and their attitude towards me, not their status in society.