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RFC
Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
On WT:RFC#can_do_without, the point was made that these may be SOP. In particular, they seem like regular uses of sense 10 of do, "to fare" — Dictionary.com in fact uses "do without an automobile" as a usex of their sense "get along, fare, manage". And one can sub in other synonyms of do/fare, e.g. "I could get along just fine without any more comments like that". OTOH, some dictionaries (e.g. Collins) do grant some of these expressions entries, and do does has so many senses that I can see how some might think it unreasonable to expect a novice user to figure out which sense of "do" was relevant. So what do you think? Are they idiomatic enough to keep? - -sche(discuss)17:54, 24 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
Let's start with do with (as in "I could do with another beer.") and do without (as in "After the war, they simply had to do without", which we and other dictionaries have as idioms and which fully conjugate.
"Can/could do with" seem SoP to me: can/could + do with.
"Can/could do without" can be found in a corresponding SoP sense. But I think they can also be used colloquially in a way that means more and which does not gracefully or commonly conjugate. DCDuringTALK18:39, 24 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
Certainly do without collocates with other English modal verbs. There are thousands of Google Book hits for "shall do without", "should do without", "might do without" and "may do without". Mglovesfun (talk) 17:08, 26 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
"I could/can do without remarks such as that." does not mean "I could/can make do/get by in the absence of such remarks" in its most common use in discourse (or reported discourse or imputation of the emotion of others). It is something like a request that someone stop making such remarks. We often include items based on their speech-act/discourse function. DCDuringTALK17:19, 26 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
That's where it came from, but it is a lexical item now.
Alternative ways of expressing it such as "I don't need remarks such as that." are possible, but I think they require that the verb be strongly stressed to have the same force as the same sentence with could/can do without. DCDuringTALK17:29, 26 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
I disagree. In "I don't need remarks such as that." need does not need to be stressed at all. Also compare things like "I could use less of those remarks." --WikiTiki8917:36, 26 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
Creative speakers - and who isn't? - can invent variations on almost any formula. "He finally kicked the old/proverbial bucket." In this case: "I could live without...", "I'd be perfectly happy without...", "You could stop .... and I'd be perfectly happy."
I still believe that the colloquial use (also in reported speech etc.) of "can/could do without" is not narrative/descriptive in nature, but is a formula used to express annoyance. As with other such common speech-act formulas, it is idiomatic, as some dictionaries agree. Macmillan, for example has, in addition to the normal definition of do without the following run-in non-gloss definition:
can/could do without something(spoken) used for saying that something is annoying you and causing problems for you
with the following synonyms: "American English synonyms or related words for this sense of do without:
can/could do without To prefer not to experience or deal with: I could do without their complaints.
Obviously these cannot be used completely interchangeably, but the idea is clear: the meaning goes beyond that of the narrative/descriptive sense. DCDuringTALK12:51, 27 November 2013 (UTC)Reply
Keep the first 4 items, even if uncertain. Do so in part since these items do not seem to be clear-cut sums of parts, in part since at least Collins appears in “could do with”, in OneLook Dictionary Search., and MacMillan's do without has "can/could do without something" as a separate definition. Most or all of the reasoning of DCDuring above applies, I think. About could have done with and could have done without, these seem to be transparent tenses that we do not need, since we have understood but not have understood and the like, but I am not sure. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:29, 8 December 2013 (UTC)Reply
