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What is the clause structure of this sentence?

Five'll get you ten, this rain stops in three minutes.

Scenario: I'll (or somebody will) pay you $10 if this rain hasn't stopped within three minutes; if it has stopped within three minutes, you pay me (or somebody) $5.

Laurel
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TimR
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    Where is this sentence from? I haven't heard this usage of "get" to describe bets. – alphabet Sep 04 '23 at 17:08
  • I'm guessing that you could put an "if" before "this rain," but not a "that," in which case this is some sort of covert conditional. – alphabet Sep 04 '23 at 17:15
  • https://www.google.com/books/edition/Just_for_Kicks/s6CvR1wNR2wC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=five%27ll+get+you+ten&pg=PA128&printsec=frontcover – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:23
  • There shouldn’t be a comma in there. – Tinfoil Hat Sep 04 '23 at 17:23
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    Punctuation of such things is purely conventional. Grammar, by contrast, is chthonic. – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:25
  • It would be easier for you to figure out your clause structure if you didn't have a comma there. – Tinfoil Hat Sep 04 '23 at 17:26
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    The construction goes back. There's a line in Mack the Knife from 1928's The Threepenny Opera: "Five'll get ya ten, old Macky's back in town". – jimm101 Sep 04 '23 at 17:26
  • @TinfoilHat Pay no attention to the comma. There are two clauses, right? – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:27
  • It's a (fairly) sure bet (2:1), Macky's back in town. The favorite in a horse race often runs at 2:1 odds. – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:33
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    @jimm101 — That line is not from 1928 — Bobby Darrin worked it into his version of Mack the Knife in 1959. – Tinfoil Hat Sep 04 '23 at 18:14
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    Now one and one is two, and two and two is four. But five will get you ten if you know how to woyk it - Mae West from the B&W film My Little Chickadee. – Yosef Baskin Sep 04 '23 at 23:41
  • I believe Five'll get you ten is a reference to a $5 bet with a $10 winning payout. – John Gordon Sep 05 '23 at 02:32
  • Another example: Smith snorted, “Let’s get a fix on the nearest stargroups and make a random pass through the thickest of it. One gets you ten, we find a McKomin ratio under 0.2.” (from the short story Each An Explorer by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1956). Not being a USAian or familiar with the idiom, it completely baffled me the first time I read it… (It didn't help that the ‘one’ looks like a pronoun.) – gidds Sep 05 '23 at 11:41
  • I'd have assumed it was the other way, that the "win" state was the rain stopping in three minutes. Then again, why would you offer the bet if it you think it's a surefire loss? Is this the "could care less" problem in another guise? – No Name Sep 05 '23 at 12:25
  • @NoName: I see it as the speaker offering 2:1 odds to someone who would bet against the proposition this rain stops in three minutes. – TimR Sep 05 '23 at 12:29

2 Answers2

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You have a main clause with a zero-that that-clause (warning: grammar terms vary).

Five’ll get you ten is an idiom meaning chances are good.

Five’ll get you ten [that] this rain stops in three minutes.

Chances are good [that] this rain stops in three minutes.

Tinfoil Hat
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    Five'll get you ten means the odds are 2:1. If you bet $5 and win, you get $10. Of course, that's only in the view of the speaker, who is offering to bet on those odds with that phrase. – John Lawler Sep 04 '23 at 20:08
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    *I bet you this rain stops in three minutes.* – TimR Sep 05 '23 at 10:57
  • It is the exact opposite as John has already pointed out. Let's extend the odd to make it clear. If I say to someone: A dollar gets you $100 that this rain stops in 3 minutes. I'm saying I'll take 100:1 odds against this happening. – Quaternion Sep 05 '23 at 17:36
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    2:1 odds are not horrible but imagine you are at a bus top with a roof and there is a down pour and the bus is showing up in 3 minutes... Someone says to you "Five'll get you ten that this rain stop in three minutes." They are telling you you're probably going to get wet. – Quaternion Sep 05 '23 at 17:42
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    @Quaternion The opposite. The clause is stating the speakers position and offering the listener to bet against them at those odds. – Neil Slater Sep 05 '23 at 19:19
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    I agree with @NeilSlater's interpretation: If Alice says this to Bob, she is extending an offer to Bob; if Bob wagers five dollars, and it doesn't stop raining in three minutes, Alice will pay up ten dollars. Otherwise, it wouldn't be "five'll get you ten." ¶ Incidentally, this expression seems somewhat old-fashioned to me, and already seemed that way when I was a kid mumblety-mumble years ago. – Brian Tung Sep 05 '23 at 20:01
  • Incidentally, the same meaning, but with the bet reversed as in @Quaternion's interpretation, exists in the also old-fashioned expression, "[I'll bet you] Dollars to donuts, this rain stops in three minutes." Meaning, I'll wager some dollars, and if it doesn't stop raining in three minutes, you only have to give me donuts. I have a sneaking suspicion that "donuts" = "bagels" = "nothing," but I have nothing but that suspicion. – Brian Tung Sep 05 '23 at 20:04
  • Y’all are thinking too hard. Five’ll get you ten means — to put it another way — If you bet that this rain will stop in three minutes, you will double your money. It’s advice — not a bet between the speaker and the listener; you lay your bets at the metaphorical track. – Tinfoil Hat Sep 06 '23 at 01:12
  • @BrianTung we are not in disagreement about the mechanics of the bet I think where we differ is in the interpretation. If Alice is willing to offer 2:1 odds to Bob, that: The rain will stop in in 3 minutes and that is she is willing to loose $10 for each $5 Bob puts in. Is she saying she thinks the rain is unlikely or likely to stop in that time? If the former then we are in agreement if the later; she is unexpectedly charitable for reasons I don't understand. – Quaternion Sep 06 '23 at 19:44
  • The way I'd interpret the meaning would be both by tone and by meaning. When I hear this expression I hear it given in like a sales pitch way, or the way a fair hawker would call "$5 will get you X tosses!". Where "tosses" is hardly likely to work out for you. In this way I almost tune out the nature of the bid and would simply assume someone being comedic about how unlikely the assertion is to work out by mimicking a bookie, salesperson, carnie. – Quaternion Sep 06 '23 at 19:52
  • @Quaternion: To be honest, I haven't thought this hard about the mechanics in some time, so I may be getting them wrong, but one thing I know for sure: In any usage I've ever seen, the idiom invariably means, "It's likely that..." – Brian Tung Sep 06 '23 at 19:58
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    @TinfoilHat: Of course no actual bet is happening. At this point, we're worrying out a literal interpretation to explain the figurative meaning that is always in play, quite aside from the original question of how the sentence parses. – Brian Tung Sep 06 '23 at 19:59
  • @BrianTung well it wouldn't be the first time an idiom is the opposite of what I thought it should be. May I ask your locale? We use dollars to donoughts here, we do like our donoughts here in Canada. I haven't seen the idiom in question (outside of a sales pitch at a fair, but then they are being quite literal), my argument was purely logical, and I'll admit when it comes to expressions that can be irrelevant. – Quaternion Sep 06 '23 at 20:32
  • @Quaternion: California – Brian Tung Sep 06 '23 at 20:53
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You could infer some hidden structure, such as an omitted subordinator. For example, you could take the comma to represent the word "that".

On the other hand, if you take the surface structure as is, then you simply have two two main (independent) clauses connected by a comma (often called a "comma splice").

MarcInManhattan
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  • +1. Please imagine a world without @*(#)@)$ punctuation. Being facetious. Let's leave punctuation out of this. Punctuation is merely a guard-rail, somebody's idea of helpfulness. – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:36
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    @TimR If you imagined the sentence without a comma, then it would commonly be called a "run-on" sentence. – MarcInManhattan Sep 04 '23 at 17:38
  • But it's not a run-on. – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:39
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    @TimR According to most common definitions, it is. If you think not, then you should explain why not (perhaps by explaining your definition of "run-on"). – MarcInManhattan Sep 04 '23 at 17:41
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    It's possible that "five'll get you ten" could be considered some kind of disjunct (perhaps an interjection?), but I've never heard that phrase before so I can't tell. – MarcInManhattan Sep 04 '23 at 17:42
  • You must not hang out at the race track. Never been to Belmont? – TimR Sep 04 '23 at 17:43
  • Here, if it is a comma splice, it's vastly preferable to the usual proffered semicolon. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 04 '23 at 18:23
  • @EdwinAshworth I might prefer a colon, but I agree that a semicolon wouldn't seem to link the clauses appropriately. – MarcInManhattan Sep 04 '23 at 19:36
  • I far prefer the comma. The colon seems to present a register-clash with the language involved. I suspect the comma is the usual choice, with zero punctuation in second place. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 04 '23 at 20:01
  • @EdwinAshworth The comma ceratainly may be the usual choice, but I'd interpret it some other way (not as splicing two main clauses). Similar to when someone says "I'll grant you, [main clause]." – MarcInManhattan Sep 04 '23 at 22:41
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    Or 'It's official: Queen Anne is dead.' A modal (expressing level of confidence) pragmatic marker. // Actually, splicing main clauses is not as criminal as some would make out; Barbara Wallraff in her book "Word Court" goes further than 'a comma may on occasion be acceptable', commenting on the sentence

    << It's not a comet, it's a meteor. >>:

    '[P]unctuating this sentence with a semicolon would be like using a C-clamp to hold a sandwich together.' And 'I came, I saw, I conquered' has a certain pedigree.

     – Edwin Ashworth Sep 05 '23 at 13:43
  • @EdwinAshworth Yes, a comma splice may connect fairly short main clauses, but that implies coordination. For example, I could write your first example as: "It's not a comet; [[rather,]] it's a meteor." I don't see how coordination would make sense in OP's sentence, though. That's why I'd prefer to consider it to be some other comma usage instead of a splice. – MarcInManhattan Sep 05 '23 at 20:50
  • Pragmatic markers are parentheticals. Five'll get you ten, this rain stops in three minutes. / Without doubt, this rain will stop in three minutes. / This rain will doubtless stop in three minutes. /// The example here is unusual in that the matrix sentence doesn't really work. It's doubtless a register issue, and it does seem likely that in this case the 'that' of a that-clause is deleted. – Edwin Ashworth Sep 06 '23 at 11:17