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Sun 17 Apr, 2005 05:17 pm
Hello,
What does 'but for' mean in the sentence below? Does it mean 'in spite of ' or 'along with'?
But for all his achievements Hassan is a controversial figure.
Thanks
'In spite of' but it is a little less exclamatory than that. It's an almost poetic turn of phrase - bordering on cliche.
It depends on what the acheivements are. Without any context, to me it looks like a sentence incorrectly begun with "but" as a conjunction.
eg
But for the grace of god there go I
wow a split infitive too.
"But for" is an idiom meaning roughly "without" or "had it not been for".
E.g.:
But for Jack I would have been killed (i.e. "had it not been for Jack /without Jack I would have been killed").
hingehead wrote:wow a split infitive too.
Uh, where? There's no infinitive in that sentence.
Sorry - all I know about split infinitives comes from Star Trek 'To boldly go'.
An infinitive
An infinitive is to followed by a verb.
She hoped to go first. "To go" is your infinitive. "To go boldly" is correct, "To boldly go" is a split infinitive.
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