1160: Condensing Expressions Feb 11, 2018

People are very good at figuring out what implied information should be. Simply put, this is how people can understand pronouns and other things like that. It also means that people can leave off the end of sentences, e.g

Speaker 1: "Can you meet your deadline?"

Speaker 2: "I will try" [and finish meet the deadline]

When this happens often enough to the same clauses, then the rest can easily exist on its own. Expressions like "put 2 and 2 together to make 4" are regularly abbreviated to "put 2 and 2 together". All of this is done in an effort to save time, and to sound less clunky when stating something which is probably obvious. Not to be confused however, other expressions feature bits of words or phrases that already carry connotations, such as 'bright' in "not the brightest crayon in the box" or 'sharp' in "not the sharpest tool in the shed". This also happened with 'cute'.

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