0

Marx – ladies and gents – was truly a "tough guy".

Is this sentence OK? I mean the postition of the indefinite article? Why is it not placed before the word "truly" as in the sentence "he was a very tough guy"?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

The author does not mean that Marx was a truly tough guy (= a very tough guy) but that he was truly (in truth, in fact) a tough guy and not something else (which is presumably described elsewhere in the discourse—for instance, a sentimental do-gooder or an armchair theorist).

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    I think it would be at least very least "odd" to apply modifiers like truly, really, very, to the specific word tough in OP's cited context, because of the scare quotes - which to my mind imply the enclosed term should be treated as a single semantic unit (within which you can't naturally abstract one component for modification). Not that this would be apparent in speech, so essentially it's a matter of orthography. Offhand I can't think of any similar two-word collocation where this "indivisible semantic unit" principle would apply even if there weren't any scare quotes.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jul 23, 2016 at 14:39

You must log in to answer this question.

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