Please could you tell me what the verb ‘stick’ in the following context means?
It seems that the apostrophe falls in and out of fashion. There is no official stance on the name. Or, if there is, no one sticks to it.
Note that ‘stick to’ is a phrasal verb which could mean ‘adhere to’, ‘confine to’, ‘abide by’, ‘follow’ etc.
Thank you, Anglophile!
It is worth noting that ‘stick at’ suggests staying with a certain action and to persist in it as in -
I should stick at the job you are doing because I am sure that in the end it will be worth the effort.
Thank you, Alan!
Alan, could you revisit your example. I’m sort of confused with ‘at at’ (probably a typo?) and the ‘the job you are doing’.
Thanks for that, Lawrence. An example of what you might call a typo stutter. I have edited it.
Well, Alan, do you actually mean it is ‘you’ in ‘the job you are doing’ when you say that ‘stick at’ suggests staying with a certain action and to persist in it? I thought it should be ‘I’. That is to say, why must I stick at your job? I think you get my point, don’t you?
Anglophile, perhaps looking at a fuller version would help your understanding:
I (think that you) should stick at the job you are doing because I am sure that in the end it will be worth the effort.
‘I should…’ (and also ‘I would…’ here is used to offer advice to someone. Basically you are telling them what you would do if you were in their position.
Sometimes the phrase is also appended with ‘… if I were you’ and that might also help you understand why the pronouns are correct as written:
I should stick at the job you are doing if I were you, because I am sure that in the end it will be worth the effort.
Well, maybe what you say is what Alan meant. Thanks for the clarification, but the structure is new to me.