I am currently reading Virgil Elliott, and he uses an interesting grammatical construction in the text – “without our having to tax our brains too much”. I can’t find any explanations online about why it’s our having instead of us having.
I haven’t found out why one is preferable over the other, but why it’s such a complicated construction – I’ve figured it out. Here, having to, of course, comes from “have to”, which translates into Russian as being forced, must, have to. From this “being forced,” a gerund is formed, which doesn’t exist in Russian, creating something akin to “necessity.” So, the translation becomes “without the necessity to overly tax our brains.” Thus, our is optional. It can be removed entirely.
Also, there is an interesting verb in the screenshot: amount to
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 