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SweetFreedom Posted 12 years ago
Vocabulary

"if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising"?

Does "if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising" mean "if my ability of expressing things is very bad, as my photograph impresses me, the way that I have a single friend will make me surprised"?

Context:


Charles Darwin, aged 46 in 1855, by then working towards publication of his theory of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection. He wrote to Hooker about this portrait, "if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising."[111]
  

Top answer

No. "expression" means facial expression (appearance). g.

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12 Answers
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No. "expression" means facial expression (appearance). It is saying that the photograph makes him look bad (e.g. he looks as if he is frowning, or unfriendly, or whatever it might be). He thinks that if he looks that bad in real life, then it's suprising that he has any friends.

There should be no comma after "expression".
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Now I'm trying to read "how I can have one single friend is surprising".
Any one care to tell me whether it is clear to your ear?

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Here is a recording of the passage. Here is a bad expression:
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SweetFreedomIn the recording I read it as "How can I have one single friend is surprising".
It should be "how I can have one single friend is surprising".
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I know that.
What I wanted to know is whether a native English speaker can understand what I said immediately if I didn't offer the text beforehand.
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SweetFreedomWhat I wanted to know is whether a native English speaker can understand what I said immediately if I didn't offer the text beforehand.
That's a good way to go about it. As it turns out, I understood most of it, mostly the beginning and the end, but I was a little lost in the middle, the "have a friend" part.

One little thing. You're say
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SweetFreedomWhat I wanted to know is whether a native English speaker can understand what I said immediately if I didn't offer the text beforehand.
I doubt I would understand it fully without having read the script, but it doesn't help either that by changing the words you have made it ungrammatical. The most problematic words for me are "have" (especially the
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