2019-11-30
5 分钟Hi there.
This is Harry, and welcome back to the final podcast of this particular week.
And this again is a sentence.
And again, I'm using the emphatic language and some inversion because somebody wrote to me and asked me, could I explain it again?
So we usually use inversion when we want to invert or change around the word order, where we want to get a little bit more emphasis.
We want to emphasize some particular point.
It's not normally the way that we would speak to each other because it's a little bit formal and theatrical in some ways, but it's often what you'll see in some drama book or some magazine or something where the writer or author wants to get your particular.
The reader's particular attention.
So we use this emphatic or inverted expression, okay?
And there are many, many different expressions that we can get to cause this effect, and this is an example of one of them.
So let me give you the reading of this sentence.
First reading, little did I imagine that I would ever meet someone so famous as he was.
Second reading, little did I imagine that I would ever meet someone so famous as he was.
So it's not likely that we will say that to a friend over a beer or a glass of wine.
Little did I imagine we probably say, God, I could never imagine, or I would never believe.
So that would be a more natural English to use.
I would never believe, or I could never imagine that I could meet somebody like that.
But it happened.
But in this sense, as I said, we're using it to emphasize the point, to create a bit of an atmosphere, to perhaps create a little bit of mystique or mystery around it.
So we invert.