“To loan” in English is to be the giver of a loan; “to borrow” would be the parallel action by the recipient. A bank or lending company might “LOAN up to 4x you[r] monthly salary” – you the borrower would not.
Think of it as a oarallel to “A teacher should learn his/her students their lessons”: he or she would teach; the students would (it is to be hoped) learn from the teaching.
Yep…as the SMS is max 160 characters, I am trying to argue that if they simply replaced “loan” with “borrow” the entire message would be acceptable (at least within the confines of the character limit).
But with simply “loan up to”…although its a bit inconclusive, the grammar is “off” - unless of course the bank really does want you to lend them your monthly salary…
If “loan” is a noun, it’s not too bad a phrase. It wouldn’t be a sentence, but I don’t get the impression it’s supposed to be anyway. (Advertisements regularly use sentence fragments.) In any case, I read it as saying either:
[We will] loan up to 4x your monthly salary, or
[Get a] loan [valued at] up to 4x your monthly salary
I don’t read it as an imperative sentence at all. If you do impose an imperative interpretation, then “loan” is the wrong word, but why do that? That’s presumably why I didn’t read it as an imperative in the first place.
Yeah, my read on that sentence is loan is being used as a noun, not an imperative, but I prefer CurtC’s version with a plural to the singular. The only definite error I see is the “you” which should be “your” in the message. I suspect this may be a typo by the OP, though.
Or rather, I have been here for some time, and I am a he.
Thanks
I like the
“Loans. Up to 4 x…”
I have always taken loan as to mean “lend to” unless it is modified in some (eg: I will take a loan)
It is common here to see a sentence like “can you fetch me to the airport”
But sorry I don’t quite get all this noun, verb, imperative stuff - I am not “grammar literate” … yet I work in PR and Publishing (as a writer at times also) :smack:
All I know is that I want the sentence to read BORROW up to 4x…Loan up to 4x just feels “icky” - and I am not beyond modifying the rules of grammar to makes me a point either.
I have this petty urge to make sure: Does the OP now see that the word “you” does appear in the message s/he transcribed? Is that word in the original, or did the original say “your”?
That’s not a bad point, actually, though the second definition for “loan” is as a transitive verb–probably reflecting usage in a descriptive linguistic sense.
Lots of people have commented to me on their disdain for the practice of verbing nouns, but it’s probably unavoidable. The most popular one right now is the verb “to google.”
They used to teach nouns and verbs at your school? At mine, we right-clicked if something was squiggly red and hit “ignore” if something was squiggly green.
He says, she says. Your teacher (or the dictionary, for that matter) does not have authority over the English language Something is only grammatically flawed until enough people start doing it.
… yet I work in PR and Publishing (as a writer at times also) :smack:
Something is only grammatically flawed until enough people start doing it.