MAKING THE media rounds to promote his new book, "A Man Without a Country," Kurt Vonnegut told a Washington Post reporter one of his favorite sour jokes, about the Martians landing in Manhattan and checking into the Waldorf. That's the bad news, Vonnegut says: "The good news is, they only eat homeless people." But for one subset of language sticklers, the bad news is Vonnegut's syntax. The good news is, it's easily repaired: His punchline should read, "They eat only homeless people." Forget "War of the Worlds": That was a mere skirmish next to the long-running War of the Onlys. For nearly 250 years, usage authorities and citizen soldiers have been trading shots over the proper placement of only in written English. There's no problem with the spoken language, all agree. Say it or sing it, "I only have eyes for you" means just one thing. But write it down, and you risk ambiguity, according to the fussy faction: It might mean "I alone have eyes for you" or "I have eyes for you, but no time for you." Far-fetched, perhaps, but it's widely believed: Two readers have e-mailed to say that when I wrote, in last week's column, that "I only looked back as far as the mid-'70s," I ought to have said "I looked back only as far as the mid-'70s," though neither could put his finger on an actual ambiguity. Where did this notion get started? Apparently we can blame Robert Lowth, an 18th- century Anglican bishop and patriarch of prescriptivism, for the only dogma. But the gospel he preached was not the doctrine we know today. According to Merriam-Webster's indispensable Dictionary of English Usage, Lowth merely observed, in his 1763 grammar book, that an adverb is "generally placed close or near to the word, which it modifies or affects"; only was just an example. In the 19th century, however, usage pedantry transformed Lowth's mild remark into a rule. By 1909, Ambrose Bierce was insisting on "He had only one," arguing that "He only had one" meant "he alone had one." These days, the chief defender of the restricted only is Bryan Garner, whose Modern American Usage (2003) calls it "perhaps the most frequently misplaced of all English words." But there were always dissenters from the Lowthian orthodoxy, including H.W. Fowler, who thought the risk of anyone's misunderstanding "He only died a week ago" was "chimerical." The fussbudgets who insist on "He died only a week ago," he wrote in the 1926 edition of Modern English Usage, are tin-eared literalists with "more zeal than discretion."Bergen and Cornelia Evans were equally dismissive: "In most cases only is a sentence adverb and qualifies the entire statement," they wrote in A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957), and "its natural position is before the verb." Harper's Dictionary of English Usage (1985), though it stomped all over hopefully and prioritize, thought only was a sideshow-"a matter of great concern to a few self-styled purists." But perhaps the oddest thing about the only war is how little there is to fight over. Despite Garner's alarmist pronouncement, it's pretty rare to find a confusing only in the wild. In some 25 years of editing, I don't think I ever saw a truly misleading example. Partly, that may be because writers and editors follow the only rule. Merriam-Webster's DEU mentions a pre-1962 survey that found 84 percent of print samples put only in the "orthodox" position. In a tiny newspaper sampling last week, I got similar results: There were 48 cases where only could go in more than one place, and in 38 instances, or 79 percent, it was snuggled up to the word it qualified. The remaining only citations, though, support the laissez-faire faction. Some were quoted speech and others written text, but either way, the "misplaced" onlys weren't causing any trouble. "If I can only save us $2 million, well, that's a gym"; "they're only doing this to protect the little guy"; "the code's existence only became public Tuesday." Only by ripping them out of context and torturing them could you make these sentences ambiguous.But if pursuing the vagrant only in all its disguises is your idea of a grammatical good time, why not? As the old saying goes, You only live once.

Уверен, в юсиджах можно найти уйму примеров going back some 200+ years по теме.
И тем не менее to my foreign(er's?) ear) исходное предложение is ill-phrased)

VIadimir, thanx, fun read... maniletterz it is, but one would only read it if it's fun, right? ;)

22.02.2011 15:23 link
... буквальный перевод:
"(Я могла/У меня получалось) лгать ему лишь до сих пор."

... иногда в разговорной речи некоторые слова, частицы и проч. опускаются за очевидностью ... но в словарях этого фиг нароешь ... поэтому применение головы при переводе является обязательным ...

..................................................................................................

Meredith Grey's Season 2 Monologues – 2.1 « kNOw Thyself… - [ Перевести эту страницу ]We can only lie to ourselves for so long. We are tired. We are scared. Denying it doesn't change the truth. Sooner or later, we have to put aside our denial ...

Без обид на этот форум и его представителей. Идите в ногу без меня )

...осталось только рассмотреть вариант "I could only lie to him Goodbye"

Приведенную статью (к-рая имела самое прямое отношение к обсуждаемой теме) я дал не ссылкой, т.к. она ушла в архив и нужен fee)

А своё мнение я высказал.

Я не понял, эту фразу уже перевели?

"I only have eyes for you" = Только ты мне нужна

If we don’t make it alive
Well it’s a hell of a good day to die
All our light that shines strong
Only lasts for so long

Have fun translating "so long" your way.

natasha396, +1. Keep it up.

there once was a line from a movie
that nobody found all that moving.
still they had long discussion
how to say it in Russian...
though the very first answer would do it!
=)

There was a short line from a movie
That nobody found at all moving,
But it bred a discussion
Of how t'put it in [the*] Russian,
Even though the first answer was groovy.

*optional

Happy now?))

"all that" is wholeheartedly seconded.

"Вы меня делаете красным" как говорит мой знакомый нейтив, когда смущается...

прелесть лимерикского анапеста отчасти в том, что "long" вполне уложится! просто "упоры строки" (мой термин) чуть сдвинутся: "But it bred a long discussion", где "a long" проиносится в один слог: 'hlon

т.е. все срослось!)