For instance, ‘He’s a good singer however, he’s no Frank Sinatra’ could be rewritten quite easily to read, ‘He’s a good singer, (al)though he’s no Frank Sinatra’. THOUGH and ALTHOUGH are two more words which can be used more or less interchangeably with however. Remember to steer clear of ‘irregardless’, a word frowned upon because it makes no sense (the ir- prefix presumably negates the word regardless, so its meaning would be the opposite of ‘regardless’). Indeed, a suite of words which also convey this idea of just the same or notwithstanding are REGARDLESS, ANYHOW, ANYWAY, and EVEN SO. For instance, ‘I know it’s useless buying a lottery ticket still, someone’s got to win, haven’t they?’ A synonym for still in this sense (and for nonetheless/nevertheless) is NOTWITHSTANDING.ĪFTER ALL also performs this function, as in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590): ‘Yet after all, he victour did suruiue’ means essentially, ‘however, he survived as victor’. In such an example, ‘still’ means something similar to NONETHELESS (or NEVERTHELESS: they are both synonyms for each other): that is, DESPITE THAT, THAT BEING SAID, ALL THE SAME, or JUST THE SAME. Indeed, in syntax it is often literally closer to however, since the two are used together, as in this example from the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1825: ‘Still, however, there was another extreme which, though far less dangerous, was also to be avoided.’ The word STILL works slightly differently from but and yet and is, in some ways, closer to however than either of those. So but is a simpler and more direct way of saying virtually the same thing as however in such examples.Īnother short word, YET, serves a similar function, and can therefore serve as a synonym for however, as in ‘I looked in the garden, yet the cat wasn’t there’. I looked in the garden happily, the cat was there. Adverbs are often words ending in -ly, such as happily or sadly or quickly, and one can imagine a slightly different sentence that might read: However is an adverb rather than a conjunction, hence the comma that follows it. I looked in the garden however, the cat wasn’t there. ![]() But we could also have used however here: In both cases, the ( italicised) conjunction) joins the two clauses together, but in B, of course, the cat isn’t there so the conjunction but is used. Consider these two statements, involving going to look for the cat:Ī: I looked in the garden and the cat was there.ī: I looked in the garden but the cat wasn’t there. This short, simple word is a conjunction, because it is used to join clauses together, much like ‘and’. Let’s take a closer look at some of the alternatives to the word ‘however’ and how they can be used in speech and writing. In any case, there’s nothing wrong with using ‘but’ at the start of a sentence – and much can go wrong if you misuse ‘however’, treating it as a simple synonym for ‘but’. ![]() However (as it were), this misses the fact that ‘but’ and ‘however’ are different classes of words, with ‘but’ being a conjunction and ‘however’ being an adverb.Ĭuriously, the Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) names Shakespeare as the first citation of ‘however’ as a synonym for ‘but’ or ‘notwithstanding’: Shakespeare’s late history play Henry VIII, co-authored with John Fletcher, contains the lines: ‘All the Land knowes that: / How euer, yet there is no great breach.’ As the tautological ‘How euer, yet’ shows, ‘However’ is being used to mean ‘yet’ or ‘nevertheless’ here. Some teachers tell their students they shouldn’t begin a new sentence with the word ‘but’, and should substitute the word ‘however’ instead. There are lots of strange ideas surrounding the word ‘however’.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |