Some grammar question again

So while reading The Crystal Flower from Life During Wartime, I caught a sentence that is not making a lot of sense. My friend who majors in translation is also lost. So hope some native speakers can help with this:

She’d must have sent the holo-letter after coming in from the garden.

What does 'd here stand for? And, more importantly, what does the whole sentence mean?

10 Likes

I think part of the difficulty here is that the sentence is ungrammatical. I think it should have been “She must have sent the holo-letter after coming in from the garden”.

She’d is a shortened form of “She had” or “She would”, though.

10 Likes

I work in publishing and this is grammatically incorrect. The error should have been caught by anyone proofreading it. It should be “She must have sent the holo-letter after coming in from the garden” as previously mentioned.

But if they wanted to use a contraction (for any reason, whether to sound slightly more colloquial, or closer to native spoken speech), it could be “She must’ve sent the holo-letter after coming in from the garden.”

10 Likes

I teach and yes that sentence is grammatically incorrect and must be a mistake. The 'd shouldn’t be there.

10 Likes

I thought it’s would and my friend had, but neither of these makes sense.

It’s such a relief to know there’s not another confusing yet correct expression in English that I didn’t learn in school. Phew! :smiley:

12 Likes

What seems likely to me is that they edited part of the sentence, but didn’t fix the rest of the sentence to match. It might have originally been “She’d sent the holo-letter after coming in from the garden.”, for example.

I’m not working in publishing or teaching, or, well, anything at the moment, but I’ve usually got pretty good grammar. I’ve preread things for people before.

But no, totally on the writer or whomever was editing the book, though mistakes slip through sometimes.

12 Likes

Well, at least it’s one third way through the whole anthology, not the first sentence in the first page. :rofl:

Good to have you as a level 3 Quoter! I love quotes but I always need to listen and relisten the audio for like five times to get one short sentence right… I seem to always only remember the general meaning and nothing of the specific words and phrases used. Really need to work on that.

10 Likes

It is also a problem of common spoken English being used in written English. We all say things that are grammatically incorrect, but when it gets written down it looks silly, and makes little sense.

10 Likes

A linguistic would argue that it’s how languages evolve. That grammar is what people actually say and not a set of written rules. I generally agree. But come on… People just love to say things that makes little to no sense, right? It’s so frustrating

12 Likes

Oh, most of the quotes I added were from episodes, and the trick there is that I went to the transcript of the episode and copied the quote from there, then did any changes that needed to be made afterwards. Otherwise I definitely need a few listens to get the exact wording down. Part of this is me compulsively needing to make sure it’s right, though.

Of course, I did add a quote or two from “Scream of the Shalka” and I don’t remember if I found the transcript of that one at the time or not…

I do love quotes, in any case, like these ones from Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkasigan Saga:

The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.

I am an atheist myself. A simple faith, but a great comfort to me in these last days.

9 Likes

I’m not a native speaker, nor do I work in publishing or teaching, but I also reacted to the weird sentence structure and realised that the “'d” must have been a mistake, because the sentence doesn’t make any sense as it is. I guess I’ve read and listened to enough English to spot a lot of the most blaring errors that sometimes slip through the editing process.

10 Likes

I’ll always remember when I was in Japan, I did this class where the teacher said that, to him, one of the most annoying thing native English speakers do is when they says something like ‘there’s loads of things’ - we should say ‘there are’ instead of ‘there is’ and it felt like such a callout bc I indeed do that and had never noticed until then :rofl:

12 Likes

Yeah, my first thought was they changed “She’d have” (i.e., “She would have”) to the stronger “She must have” but forgot to backspace the 'd.

As an aside, in addition to had or would, 'd can also mean did - rarely, and (almost?) always with a question word.

  • I’d [I had] heard two lines when I determined Sixie was my favorite Classic Doctor.
  • I’d [I would] like to see the Fugitive Doctor with Fifteen.
  • What’d [What did] Jackie do for a living?
10 Likes