# confuse



## binzip

In using 'confuse A with B', if I use "confuse B with A', is it ungrammartical? For examples? You should not confuse liberty with license. in this sentence, if I change 'liberty' with license, like this, You should not confuse license with liberty, is it logical? Please help me?


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## 조금만

In expressions like confuse/mix/replace X with Y, exchanging the positions of X and Y alters only the meaning, and has no effect on the grammar, which remains correct.

This is a very significant difference between many Western languages and Korean. In Korean, of course, such expressions work by attaching a particle to one of the terms, and you consequently have to change the form of both terms (e.g. by transferring the particle from one to the other) to alter the meaning, and can often leave the modified terms in the same sequence in the sentence, because its not the sequence that carries the meaning in Korean.  That's why, to a native Korean speaker, just switching the positions of the terms in English can seem intuitively "wrong", or insufficient, though it isn't.


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## binzip

Thank you very much, but in a context, for examples, 
A: Have you met Professor? Jackson? That's my new teacher. 
B: I'm not sure. Is he the Chemistry teacher?
A: No, Professor Jackson is a woman but she teaches biology.
B: Oh, I've never met. I was confusing her with Professor Wilson.

If I exchanges the positions of Professor Wilson and her, is it illogical? 
Please tell me your opinion? Thank you so much, again


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## 조금만

binzip said:


> Thank you very much, but in a context, for examples,
> A: Have you met Professor? Jackson? That's my new teacher.
> B: I'm not sure. Is he the Chemistry teacher?
> A: No, Professor Jackson is a woman but she teaches biology.
> B: Oh, I've never met. I was confusing her with Professor Wilson.



On the main point. If you were to say:
B ... I was confusing Professor Wilson with her.

that would not be either illogical or ungrammatical, but it would sound slightly strange, because it implies that the main topic of the exchange is the identity of Professor Wilson, and yet in your snippet Prof Wilson hasn't been mentioned before. But supposing we add a new initial sentence to that group, such as 

B: Professor Wilson is the best teacher in this college.

and then continue as before with your example as given (so that the conversation is now seen to be about the comparative merits of the two professors, both of whom have been introduced at the start of the exchange), you could reverse the terms without any oddity.

Or,  put differently: by making Prof Wilson into the direct object of the verb 'confuse' you would be saying "I am focussing on Prof Wilson and the various people he might be confused with", whereas in your original order you were focussing on "her" = Professor Jackson and the people _she _might be confused with. Whether the reversed order of terms  makes sense or not depends entirely on whether Professor W has been mentioned already, which, in my extended version of your example, he has.

[Incidentally, instances like this illustrate why the notion of "topic", though not grammatically explicit as it is in Korean, is nevertheless present in English discourse and has visible effects on syntax and meaning]


I hope you won't mind me adding a further observation. In English "met" is transitive. We don't say "*I've never met". It would have to be "I've never met _her/him_"  What makes this tricky for learners is that there is a common expression "We haven't [_or_ have never] met" (= we don't know each other) or "They haven't met" (= they don't know each other) or "they met at the station" (= they met one another there) The reason these apparently objectless  cases are possible despite the verb being transitive is that, as my glosses indicate, they have an implied reflexive and involve at least two parties. For that reason, however, it is impossible to say "*I've met" or "*he met" since the only implied reflexive object would be "*I've met myself" or "*he met himself" which would be absurd.


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## binzip

I really appreciate it.


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