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Tue 11 Dec, 2012 02:16 am
"if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, (america) always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always in an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise."
i meet some difficulties translating this sentence, could you please help me paraphrase it?
@Grace dou,
". . . to a man. . . means each and every individual citizen.
@Grace dou,
It is somewhat old-fashioned and excludes women.
@Grace dou,
If all of its individual citizens are to be believed . . . etc. . . .
@Grace dou,
Quote:". . . to a man. . . means each and every individual citizen.
Yes that's right. It means everybody, with no exceptions.
That being so, it is deliberate hyperbole when considering the whole population of the country. A kind of rhetorical device.
You asked for the whole sentence to be paraphrased, but I imagine the meaning of the rest is clear?
Charles Dickens really despised the United States.
@Setanta,
Setanta wrote:
Charles Dickens really despised the United States.
That quote fron Chuzzlewit seems uncannily accurate today. Simon Callow's one-man show did very well on Broadway. Dickens is by an enormous margin my favourite writer.
@contrex,
I like old Charlie a good deal myself, although i wouldn't call him my favorite. However, it's the absolute which gets my goat (who has been missing for a long, long time). Not every American is a teabagger idiot, no more than every Angle-ishman is a Lord Haw-Haw.
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