THE BRONX—Thursday morning I woke up early and in a state of agitation. I had freelance editing to do and I had to go over changes on a book review I wrote last week in Istanbul and London. Nothing out of the ordinary, I went right at it, and everything got closed, neat and tidy. The book review should be out next week. To relax I put on some music. I like the Eagles because Hotel California was my first tape, given to me by my parents so that I had something that was “mine” to listen to on long rides with my father in his eighteen-wheeler picking up loads of bananas in Wilmington or Newark and delivering them to Massachusetts. I often put the album on when I’m proofreading—that’s life in the fast lane for you. Still, some mornings you’re not in the mood for the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air. (Until just now I’d always assumed the line was “colite dust,” some kind of odiferous dust warmed by the sun, perhaps reddish in color, that I’ve never been familiar with because I don’t spend much time in California. Turns out I was wrong and “colitas” just means buds from a cannabis plant. Of course it does.) I advanced the album to “Victim of Love,” then to one of my favorites, “Try and Love Again.” It’s the last Eagles song by bassist Randy Meisner, who also wrote “Take It to the Limit.” He’s the twangiest of the group. Don’t know anything else about him—none of my business.
I didn’t think too much about the song or its refrain until later in the afternoon when all the work was done and I was procrastinating before starting in on a new piece (as I am still doing by writing this). I came across a tweet by Tariq Ali that made me think of Meisner’s song. (I’ve always loved Tariq’s writing, its urgent flow born of righteousness but also shot through with irony, a no-nonsense nimbleness to the prose; I’ve been meaning to read his new memoir.) Here’s the sentence that caught my eye: “Now the government is threatening IK’s sons with arrest if they visit Pakistan to try and see their father.” (For more from Tariq on Imran Khan, see here or here. Yesterday Sidecar published his interview with Jean-Luc Mélenchon.) Since I was procrastinating I figured I would look up what the grammarians say about “try and” and “try to.” Everywhere I’ve ever worked as an editor, house style would be to impose “try to” over “try and” unless except in cases of direct quotation, fictional dialogue, or a self-consciously colloquial voice, especially a fictional one. But what, I wondered, is the linguistic truth? And what is the origin of the deviation? When I read the first thing that came up with a Google search, an article on the Merriam-Webster site called “We’re Going to Explain the Deal with ‘Try And’ and ‘Try To,’” I was surprised and dumbfounded.