I want to know the differences between these two sentences.
- send a mail to me.
- put a mail to me.
Does the send and put changes the meaning of the sentence?
differencesentence-construction
I want to know the differences between these two sentences.
- send a mail to me.
- put a mail to me.
Does the send and put changes the meaning of the sentence?
Best Answer
I looked up put in the NOAD dictionary, and found this definition:
Based on that definition, I can understand why you think these two words might be synonymous, but they are not!
The verb put is used in a local context (that is, rarely much further than a room or house), whereas send is used in more of a long-distance context.
For example, for put, we would say:
whereas for send, we might say:
With mail, mail is almost always sent, unless we are are talking about the individual letters, which can be put anywhere after they have arrived:
Of course, English being English, it's not always that straightforward. In the 1960's, was the goal to
put a man on the moon, or to send a man to the moon? According to my guidance, send would be
the better word. So why did John F. Kennedy say in a speech:
I think that's because send sometimes has a connotation of being a one-way trip. We don't expect Aunt Emma will return those cookies, or that Uganda will send back the medical supplies. That's what president Kennedy was emphasizing in another speech, when he said:
The verb put can imply putting something down gently or safely, whereas sending a person to the moon says nothing about getting the astronaut back safely.