differencesemphasismeaningword-usage
What is the main difference between these sentences:
- To your surprise, he is alive.
- Much to your surprise, he is alive.
Is much only used to emphasize your surprise?
Can I have a conversation with a buddy like this?
— You tried to kill your husband last night?
— Yup, I think he is dead.
— Much to your surprise, he is alive.
— Oh.
If you say when something happens, you imply it definitely will happen, even if the precise timing is unknown. You use if when there's uncertainty about whether the event will happen at all.
It's quite common — especially in informal contexts — to use when/if as a shorthand way of signifying when, but allowing for the possibility that the event in question may not in fact occur.
Personally I tend to use the composite when/if rather than if/when, for no reason I can clearly explain. I can't easily search for those hyphenated forms to check others' usage, but I can use NGram to check the more extended equivalents. This covers well over a million instances, so I think it's statistically significant. But I have no idea why three out of four people put them the opposite way round to me...
Beggar is obviously different from the other two in that he is not offering goods for sale, just begging.
From the definitions, both hawkers and peddlers travel about selling things, but in my mind a hawker is more of a person who calls out their goods for sale in a public place, while a peddler may be going door to door.
Best Answer
"Much" is added for emphasis here.
It's normal to say "Much to my surprise" (which means "I {am/was} very surprised"), but not at all idiomatic to say "Much to your surprise". For that, you'd say "You'd say something like "You'll be surprised to {hear/learn/know} that he's still alive".