unnecessary words

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Anonymous

#493333 Wed, 26 Mar 08 09:18 PM

Please tell me if the words unerlined are unnecessary. If they are, please tell me how I can fix them, especially for the second sentence.

1. They are disposing of these things in our front lawns.

2. I think I am good and here are the reasons why.

Anonymous

Clive

#493349 Wed, 26 Mar 08 10:21 PM

Hi,

Please tell me if the words unerlined are unnecessary. If they are, please tell me how I can fix them, especially for the second sentence.

1. They are disposing of these things in our front lawns. The verb 'dispose' requires 'of'.

2. I think I am good and here are the reasons why. You can omit 'why', because the word 'reason' itself includes the concept of 'why'. However, people often say 'the reason why', possibly as a form of emphasis.

Best wishes, Clive

Clive

Joined on Thu, Oct 28 2004

Canada

Veteran Member (19,503)

El tango argentino es un pensamiento triste que se puede bailar (The tango argentino is a sad thought which can be danced) Enrique Santos Discépolo

Verbs

Ant_222

#493350 Wed, 26 Mar 08 10:21 PM

1 — not redundant for sure. "Dispose of" is like "get rid of", while "dispose" implies a kind of destruction.

2 — although "why" is considered undesired in constructions like "the reason why I love you", in your example "why" sounds good to me, so I think it is neither wrong nor unnecessary...

EDIT: Clive: or does it happen only in programming that "dispose" means destroy and takes no prepositions??

Ant_222

Joined on Sun, May 21 2006

Podolsk, Russia

Contributing Member (1,440)

Prepositions, Constructions

Clive

#493355 Wed, 26 Mar 08 10:38 PM

Hi again,

does it happen only in programming that "dispose" means destroy and takes no prepositions??

I've never encountered this usage. Smile

There is a well-known saying that man proposes, but God disposes. (This is a slightly different meaning of the word 'disposes'). Broadly speaking, it means that we think we control our own future, but we don't.

Clive

Prepositions

Ant_222

#493358 Wed, 26 Mar 08 10:52 PM

Well, I mean there's the dispose(pointer) function in Pascal that releases the memory which was previously allocated with the new(pointer) function. And some OO-languages provide the dispose() method for destroying an object: a = getSomeThing;
b=a^;
dispose(a);

or

MyObject.Dispose();

Ant_222

#493361 Wed, 26 Mar 08 10:56 PM

«There is a well-known saying that man proposes, but God disposes.»

Hmmm! We have exactly the same proverb, I mean literally the same:

Man		pro~	~poses,		God	dis~	~poses
Chelovek	pred~	~polagaet,	Bog	ras~	~polagaet

Ain't that fun?

Ant_222

Verbs

CalifJim

#493380 Thu, 27 Mar 08 12:43 AM

There must be hundreds of those "exact equivalent" 'prefix + root' patterns in Russian, but I hadn't heard of an entire proverb like that. Smile

CalifJim

Joined on Mon, Aug 2 2004

California

Veteran Member (16,009)

"There are no facts, only interpretations" - Nietzsche

Verbs

CalifJim

#493381 Thu, 27 Mar 08 12:46 AM

The whole point of computer code is brevity. The meaning of dispose(a) is simply "Dispose of a".

CalifJim

Clive

#493414 Thu, 27 Mar 08 03:38 AM

Every computer language follows its own syntactical rules, and these are not the standard grammar of the English language. Smile

Best wishes, Clive

Clive

Grammar

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