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A question in reading "A Watering Place" by Hayden


ijkou

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How does the underlined sentence work? Is it a parenthesis? What does it mean? Could you grammatically explain it to me?

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I'm an English learner and recently I am trying to chew some classical masterpieces. I've never been abroad. All I learned is from school textbooks, British drama series, or BBC News :-)

I really focus on English grammar and vocabulary. But when I read some original English edition books, like Pride and Prejudice, the way of expression of the words and sentences can really drive me mad! X-<  Maybe I am just not able to understand some sort of your daily expression, like "be that as it may" and "be the means what they may". I think, they are inverted sentences and meanwhile elliptical sentences. You know, we are not only different in languages, but also in ways of thinking.

I'm going a little far. Could you help me on this sentence? Thank you!

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By the way, I can totally understand the other words on the picture below:

1. "To places like this come..." is an inverted sentence.

2. "young wife-hunters in search of..." and "young husband-hunters in search of..." are both Nominative Absolute Construction

3. "the former resolutely bent to giver the latter heirs to their lands and tenements" is the main sentence.

Am I right?

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I would say the sentence is talking about the rich old men using whatever money they have to get a pretty, young, goldigging girl to give them an heir.

 

Means is another way of saying wealth or finances. So "be the means what they may" is like saying "the money being what it is" or I would probably say it, "with whatever money they have."

 

I'm interested to see what others have to say. I've never heard of this book, actually. The only reference I was able to find to it on Google was the post on this site and another one that was in Chinese.

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I would paraphrase the underlined sentence as "by any means possible." :)

Yes! I got a reply from one of my university professors, which she said is a "adverbial clause of concession". It's just another form of saying "no matter what means may be". Thank you for your paraphrase and it helps a lot!

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I would say the sentence is talking about the rich old men using whatever money they have to get a pretty, young, goldigging girl to give them an heir.

 

Means is another way of saying wealth or finances. So "be the means what they may" is like saying "the money being what it is" or I would probably say it, "with whatever money they have."

 

I'm interested to see what others have to say. I've never heard of this book, actually. The only reference I was able to find to it on Google was the post on this site and another one that was in Chinese.

 

A Watering Place seems to be one of Hayden's diaries, I am not sure. Actually,  what I am reading is a collection of prose, novels and modern issues, most of which are classics. Here are them:

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I'm reading them with a very clear purpose, that is to improve my translating skills. In China, Most MTI exams test the students' translating ability on classical masterpieses. Hard to chew though X-<

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Yes! I got a reply from one of my university professors, which she said is a "adverbial clause of concession". It's just another form of saying "no matter what means may be". Thank you for your paraphrase and it helps a lot!

 

No problem! It actually sounds like you know a lot more about the finer points of the English language than I do. :D

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