differencesmeaning
It's easier than it seems, but I don't
convey it well.
My friend says that I should change that to read
It's easier than it seems, but I don't
say it well.
However, this doesn't seem quite right to me. Is this grammatically correct? What is wrong with this sentence?
"Say" and "convey" aren't the same thing, right? Someone can say something, but still fail to convey an idea, correct?
The Linguist List thread that @cori linked to has a couple discussions of what’s going on here. For example, one commenter says:
couple is coming into the English list of indefinite numbers, just below few. … If couple with this meaning is new in the language, I suspect that it is picking up the grammar of the semantically adjacent word few.
I did a search in the Corpus of Historical American English for A COUPLE OF [N*] and for A COUPLE [N*], to search for incidences of these two idioms ([N*] means some kind of noun).
From these results, we see that A COUPLE OF is much more common than A COUPLE, although it should be noted that there are incidences of A COUPLE [N*] dating all the way back to 1820 in the corpus. Interestingly, both terms have been on the rise throughout the twentieth century, and the ratio between them has been decreasing, meaning that A COUPLE [N*] is becoming relatively more common.
Egyptian hieroglyphs are the most popular, but the word hieroglyph is of Greek origin ("sacred carvings") and can refer to the characters of several other logographic writing systems:
And more.
Best Answer
Convey means 'transfer' or 'pass on' or 'make known'. In England, at least, the process of selling a house is conveyancing, for example. In general, conveying and saying are not the same thing - you can convey ideas without saying a thing (a shrug of the shoulders could convey that you don't know, without any verbal communication). So, maybe you'd write:
The "don't convey it well" tends to mean you've tried multiple times and are still trying and not doing a very good job of conveying the ideas to the people you talk with.
On the whole, though, I think another word, such as 'explain', is better: