0

If you have drunk too much milk, you might have been taller.

Is this sentence grammatically correct?

Improve this question
7
  • 1
    Grammatical, maybe, but logical, no. Maybe: "If you had drunk more milk, you might have been taller." I'd go with "If you drank more..."
    – Yosef Baskin
    Commented Apr 16 at 19:20
  • ... milk, you might be taller".
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Apr 16 at 19:32
  • Talk to us! Where did this come from? Did you write it yourself? Do you think it's correct or incorrect? Why?
    – Stuart F
    Commented Apr 16 at 21:02
  • If you have drunk too much milk (at this point in time: now), you might feel sick. Those are the tenses. If you drank a lot of milk, you might grow taller.
    – Lambie
    Commented Apr 16 at 22:31
  • 1
    Paraphrasing, If you have drunk too much milk, you might be shorter than you could otherwise have been. But as Yosef says, this doesn't make sense in the real world.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Apr 16 at 22:48

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
0

It's easy to understand the statment. However, the sentence itself has a rather "unusual" structure.

You are looking at someone's stature and making a remark, which is, "if you had drunk (much) more milk (while growing up), you would have (probably) grown taller". "The use of "would" is correct in the result clause.

You may also say: "Had you drunk (much) more milk, you would have probably been taller".

Improve this answer
0

I built up this sentence today to an already tall lady for a pun. But it didn't feel good after I said it.

I lost a bet on her, I had guessed her height to be 1.95 cm, but she turned out to be 1.87. I asked her to measure again, maybe something has changed. She made a joke, 'she didn't measure again since she stopped playing volleyball.'

There I said this sentence to mean 'maybe you have drunk enough milk to grow tall, but also I know that even if you had drunk, it wouldn't be possible to grow tall after a certain age.'

I hope the context made sense for you.

Improve this answer
1
  • This information should have been added to the question by editing, not supplied as an 'answer'. You mean 'enough milk', not 'too much'. Others have explained why the tenses are wrong too.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Apr 17 at 7:58

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .