"It would be very hard for a man to live with me unless he's terribly strong."– Coco Chanel

Jermaine1 February 11, 2020

Explanation

Hello, would you be able to explain why with the unless it would be not VH2L -> TS. I am curious on the unless word and what it would be if unless was not in the sentence.

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Skylar February 13, 2020

@Jermaine1, happy to help!

Here's our rule for diagramming the word "unless":
Step 1: The part that the word "unless" introduces is made the N condition.
Step 2: The other part of the sentence is negated and made the S condition.

Now let's take a look at this specific question. We have the following statement: "It would be very hard for a man to live with me unless he's terribly strong."
Step 1: The part of the sentence following the word "unless" is "terribly strong." This is made into our Necessary condition.
Step 2: The other part of the sentence - "very hard for a man to live with me" is negated to "would not be very hard for a man to live with me" and made into the Sufficient condition.

This gives us an S->N statement of:
"would not be very hard for a man to live with me" -> "terribly strong"
This is abbreviated as follows:
not VH2L -> TS
We can reverse and negate this to find the contrapositive as follows:
not TS -> VH2L

This sentence has the same meaning as the following sentence without the word "unless":
If it would not be very hard for a man to live with me, then he must be terribly strong."

Does that make sense? Please let us know if you have any other questions!