Buy You A Beer vs. Pay You a Beer

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nick from San Diego.

Hi, Nick, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Several years ago I worked on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea. So one of the perks of working on a cruise ship is undoubtedly the crew bar, which served us to unwind after a long day. And one of the perks there was that the drinks were unusually cheap, usually $1 beers.

So a phrase that became common on the ship every evening was, let me buy you a beer, or I’m going to buy you a beer. And to my French-Canadian boss, this phrase didn’t make sense. He said, well, that’s silly. You’re not buying me this beer. You’re paying me this beer, since you’re giving it to me. And I tried to explain to him why he was wrong, but I couldn’t really come up with anything other than that let me buy you a beer is an odd reconfiguration of the phrase let me buy a beer for you. But since I couldn’t come up with a good explanation, we ended up paying each other beers for the rest of the contract.

And big spenders too, right? A dollar a beer?

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. You could easily get around for the table you were sitting at without breaking the bank.

I was going to say, you can’t find that in San Diego.

Yeah, that’s for sure.

That’s a really interesting question here. The easiest thing to say is I think that he just didn’t understand how the indirect object works in English.

Okay.

So you’ve got this phrase, buy you a beer. Let’s just strip it down to the basics. You is the indirect object. A beer is the direct object. And that’s how English works.

If we were to change the verb and say give you a beer, would he have had a problem with that?

I don’t think so, because I guess he had learned the words buy and pay as to exchange something in the former and to receive something in the latter. So I don’t understand indirect objects enough to be able to explain it to him either. But that’s all it is, as simple as that.

Yeah, well, an indirect object is just something that’s to or for, to you, for you. And I wonder if you ever learned the word purchase. Let me purchase you a beer.

Well, something, I suspect that his complaint was a little bit tongue-in-cheek anyway.

Of course.

But was he a native English speaker? Was he fluent in English? Was he primarily a French speaker?

He was primarily a French speaker. He spoke many languages.

Oh, cool.

But, yeah, English wasn’t his first language. I know it’s long past, but if you want to have an interesting conversation with him, if you see him again, asking him about inviter, the French verb for invite, which catches a lot of English speakers of French, because in French, if I invite you, it means that I’ve offered to pay for you as well.

Right, same thing in Spanish.

So we have all these different catches in our different languages, and he just found one that perhaps he just didn’t understand it. But that’s okay. That’s okay not to understand. You got past that, and you got to the celebration at the end of the day. You got to the beers.

Yeah, yeah, I thought it was funny, too. Nick, thank you so much for your call. I really appreciate it.

All right, thanks for taking my call.

Take care. Bye.

Thanks, Nick. Bye-bye.

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