"how do you make do anything" what does it mean?

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
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Hello Torsten Daerr,

I am Saloni here.This is the first time when i am communicating with this forum. I am an Indian ,living in Switzerland with my husband. I have one question please solve this.
Today i was just watching one steven seagal movie On Deadly Ground ,in starting Steven is making conversation with someone else about the disaster in between that he spoke “how do u make do anything” .I didn’t understand what does it mean? .Please make me sure what does it mean. sorry for my bad English i want to improve my self for that reason i regularly watch English movies.

Regards
Saloni

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Hi Saloni,

It’s good to see you on our forum. So, you watch movies in the original version to improve your listening comprehension. You are on the right track. I could imagina that Steven Segal said “How do you make do?” which means “How are you able to buy essentials (the things you need to live such as food and clothes) with so little money?” That’s just a guess, let’s see what our other forum members and moderators have to say.

Regards,
Torsten
PS: Please make sure you spell the personal pronouns I and you correctly.

TOEIC listening, photographs: Old style transport

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Saloni … to ‘make do’ in English means to manage with what you have (or don’t have). For example:

“I can’t imagine how those poor refugees make do” = “I can’t imagine how they survive with so little food and other neccessities”.

“We don’t have the correct part to fix the engine, but we can make do with a similar one from a different model of car”.

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A similar sentence included in the script is:

…how’d he make you do anything?

(On Deadly Ground Script - Dialogue Transcript)

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Hi Saloni

The word ‘anything’ doesn’t make sense with the rest of the sentence you wrote. And it definitely doesn’t work after the phrasal verb ‘make do’. I assumed that you had heard the word ‘anything’ correctly, but that you had heard something else incorrectly, or had left out a word, etc.

So, I did a little googling and found a transcipt of the movie online.
Click on this link: On Deadly Ground: Transcript

Did you hear the sentence near the beginning of the movie? If so, it looks like the actual words were these:
How’d he make you do anything? (= How did he make you do anything?)

‘Make someone do something’ has a different meaning from ‘make do’. When you ‘make someone do something’ that means you ‘force or cause someone to do something’.

In this part of the movie someone asks how Jennings forced Hugh to do anything.

If you have the video/DVD, you could try watching the film again and use the script for help in parts that are hard to understand. :smiley:

Amy

Edit:
Oops, I see Conchita beat me to the punch with the script info.

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Hi to All

Thanks to Everyone who had replied me. It’s amazing ,I am very happy to see your replies.Yesterday i was desperately waiting for reply,but feel very sad when i didn’t found any replies from this forum till my last visit on this site,because it was my first chance when i was communicating with this forum, but right now things are not like that i am glad to see your replies.It’s encourage me lot.

I will try to be concentrate on “I” and “You” as Mr Trosten suggested me. Thanks for this suggestion and keep pin-pointing me on my all mistakes.

yeah ,Amy you are right it’s mine misunderstanding.Thanks for your suggestion I will try to follow that.

Regards
Saloni

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