You Are The Same, Except You Are Worse

My son Julian and daughter Rebecca had an argument, and out from Julian's mouth came this, "you are the same, except you are worse." Almost immediately Rebecca countered "what kind of English is that?" With that I started thinking and I had to agree with Rebecca, it was not proper English.

I think my son had meant this, "You are in the same category (presumably bad) as me, but you are worse (than me)."

Speaking in Chinese, what Julian had said would have been commonly accepted as valid. I hardly ever hear this spoken in English so I am not really sure how others construct this sentence when they need to say it.

Unless you are writing a book or in a literary contest, when you need to turn on your maximum word power, I find that using the least number of words to express yourself clearly and unambiguously is the best way to go about it. In normal everyday conversation, sometimes I do have to fill in the little gap in the sentences spoken by others if they are not deemed to be complete. After all, most of the time we only need to hear half of the necessary words in a sentence and that would be sufficient for us to understand each other. You know ... what I mean. But for a child like Rebecca, who obviously is not used to guessing, yet, at what we mean when we don't speak in full sentence, then she needs a complete and logical sentence for her to be able to understand the communication. Hence she was quick to point out the logical flaw in the construction of Julian's sentence.

We can learn, or really it should be re-learn, from our children. So are you the same, except you are better?