There’s a recent thread with the title “Why do not certain colors go together?” which just came across as mangled grammar when I first read it. But if you contract the “do not” to “don’t”, it reads fine. OTOH, to correct it as written without using a contraction, you have to move the “not” after “colors”. So the use of “don’t” in the contracted sentence isn’t really a contraction, since it isn’t combining adjacent words. Right?
Is this just a weird idiosyncrasy of English that drives beginner speakers insane? Or can someone explain why you can’t just expand the contraction in this case?
Ah, but you could also restructure the query as “Why is it that certain colors do not go together?” In that case the do and not are adjacent and can be properly contracted. IANA English Teacher, but I think it has more to do with formal versus informal sentence structure.
Of course you can “uncontract” it; it’s just that people rarely do. The OP did it correctly. There’s nothing “mangled” about the grammar; you’re just not used to seeing it.
Yes, “Why do certain colors not go together” would be the more common way to do it. However, in that case, the word “not” negates “go” specifically, instead of everything after “do.”
We object to “why do not certain colours go together?” on grounds of style, not grammar. If the grammar were bad, the grammar of the contraction would be equally bad. So the editor or teacher is correcting style, not grammar.
Think of it like this-you’ve seen Star Wars and all, right?
Remember Yoda. “Away put your weapon-I mean you no harm!”
“Your father he is.”
“Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?”
“When nine-hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not!”
There’s nothing WRONG with the way he talks, but it still sounds a bit odd, eh wot?
The whole idea of “bad grammar” is that it goes against style. Grammar is how words and inflexions are put together, which can only be decided by how people put words and inflexions together. Nobody says ‘why do not certain colours go together?’, so it’s “ungrammatical”. But people do say ‘why don’t certain colours go together?’, so it is “grammatical”. People also say ‘why do certain colours not go together?’, so that is “grammatical”.
It’s nothing more than a weird idiosyncracy (among many others) that make Innglyche harder for foreigners to learn.
If Gjorp is saying that there is no distinction between grammar and style then he is wrong, wrong, wrong. The sentence
“Nine bean rows shall I have there,
and a hive for the honey-bee”
is perfectly grammatical, but (even if we were not already familiar with The Lake Isle of Inisfree by W. B. Yeats) we would recognise this as poetry from the style of writing.
Contraction is not restricted to adjacent words. So when you “un-contract” a contraction, words can be put back in the order dictated by rules of grammar and style.