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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

What's going on with the subject object verb agreement in the title? I see this format sometimes and it confuses me. Is the purpose of this format to convey something?

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That format is called "hyperbaton". As with most weird things in English, blame poetry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbaton

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/25508/is-employi...

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27420/why-is-xxx...

As is so often the case on HN, the real value is in the comments. Thanks for teaching me a new thing today. Anastrophe is going to be my word o' the day, I think.

And here in the "Forest of Rhetoric" [0], anastrophe is just one of the 433 rhetorical figures currently cataloged, many of them with fun Greek names. You've got well over a year of word o' the day material. Epistrophe is another good one.

[0] http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52596/proper-usa...

Lots of discussion around the phrase origin there.

Possible "original":

> the archetypal phrase is "One swallow does not summer make".

It’s older English, like Shakespeare which has stuck around for emphasis. It emphasizes “blue connector” in this case.

I know it from "Stone walls do not a prison make": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Althea,_from_Prison

I find when colloquialisms like this are used it's to make a point, like using a child's nursery rhyme to indicate "something so obvious a child would know it". I think in this case it's meant to imply "This is such an obvious statement that it would be known even in antiquity, but..." to allay a "duh, no kidding" response and make the headline more eye-catching.

The agreement is normal, and occurs between "does" and "connector". The weird thing is the word order.

A typical order would be "A blue connector does not make USB 3.0"

By Yoda was, this title clearly written

Sound like literal translation from German

Not in this case, the literal translation from German would be "A Blue Connector makes no USB 3.0", which makes perfect sense in English. But by shifting to the conditional you get "A Blue Connector would no USB 3.0 make", which is close.

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