[lojban-beginners] "You better!"

["David Cortesi" <davecortesi@gmail.com>]

The song "You Better You Bet" by the Who came on the radio the other
night, with its repeated lyric

    I say I love you,
    You say "You better!"
    I say I need you,
    You scream "You better!"

&etc.etc. -- and this got me thinking about the vagaries of English
grammer. "You better" is a double elision; Pete Townshend has dropped
the 'd from the contraction "You'd better" but even the uncontracted
"You had better" doesn't really parse. Only when fully expanded to
"You had better do so" is it grammatical; yet the terse idiom "You
better" (or "Yoo bettahh!" as Pete sings it) is quite understandable.

So then: lojban equivalent? It's an imperative, {ko} will be involved.
It refers to the prior utterance, {la'edi'u} is coming.

"You'd better" is related to "You would be well-advised." That latter
seems much easier to translate using {xamgu} or more the more specific
{vrude} to modify {stidi} or {gidva}; and this seems a perfect spot
for a little internal logic: {vrude jo gidva} as the core of
"well-advised" (virtuously iff guided-by?). Hence, "You'd be
well-advised to do so" might be {ko vrude jo gidva la'edi'u} ?

I wonder how many errors I made in that...

Which doesn't leave me, at least, any closer to the pungency of "You
bettah!" Maybe some idioms can't be translated at all, let alone
tersely.