Mark Twain in Nevada Fair. On May 23, 1864 Twain wrote to Ellen G. (Mrs. William K.) Cutler, a signer of the letter blasting the author of the miscegenation hoax. He apologized for not responding sooner to the letter as it "came at a moment when I was in the midst of what ought to have been a deadly quarrel with the publishers of the Union". Mrs. Cutler was the only one among the Carson City society ladies that had not ostracized Mollie Clemens, for which Twain thanked her. Twain promised that he would "say a word or two to show the ladies that
Old English grammar this order, but in main clauses, the verb is moved back to the V2 position (technically, the verb undergoes "V-to-T raising"). That is said to explain the fact that Old English allows inversion of subject and verb as a general strategy for forming questions, while modern English uses this strategy almost only with auxiliary verbs and the main verb "to be", requiring "do"-support in other cases. Because of its similarity with Old Norse, it is believed that most of the time the word order of Old English changed when asking a question, from SVO to VSO. While many purport that