Gsyfuy

About a year ago, I had an on-line friend, a native speaker, chatting with me. When I sent a message to him saying:

I'm starving to the point of death.

He rephrased that as:

I'm starving to death.

But now that I think about it, and googled it, my expression wasn't wrong and they use it a lot. So I was wondering why he had to correct the sentence. Is it not a colloquial language? Or does it have slightly differences in meaning?

If someone starves to death, they are dead.

If someone starves to the point of death, they are on the cusp of dying due to starvation, but have not yet done so. If they do not get food immediately, they will die. Your friend was using it as hyperbole, or dramatic overstatement.

Of course, if someone really were starving to the point of death, they would be unconscious and couldn't eat, and would need intravenous nutrition.

This is not to be confused with at the point of death, which means "at the moment that death occurred". It is particularly used for legal stuff related to what happens after someone dies, but is used in other contexts as well.

The idiomatic phrase is "starving to death", which is a massively exaggerated way of saying "I'm hungry". "Starving to the point of death" isn't wrong; it's just not what people normally say.

If you were speaking literally, "I'm starving to death" would mean that you had been without food for so long that you were going to die of hunger and you expected that to happen. "I'm starving to the point of death" would suggest that you somehow knew that you would almost starve to death but be rescued at the last moment. That's an unusually precise prediction! In reality, I assume you were just using hyperbole and, in that case, the idiomatic "I'm starving to death" is the phrase to use. If you're going to exaggerate for effect, exaggerate as much as possible!

In this case, hyperbole has hijacked the issue. Nonetheless, one of your statements is wildly improbable, as I will discuss.

Other answers have dealt with "I'm starving to death", at least as far as first person goes. The phrase is so widely used simply to mean "very hungry", that this is the default usage. However, a more realistic use might be along the lines of, "I'm trapped on a desert island with no food and no rescue in sight, and I'm starving to death." Although, as you might imagine, this is not what most would consider a very "realistic" scenario.

"To the point of death" is a rather different case. It would be used when the most likely outcome of the current situation is that the individual will die shortly. For a person to be so close to death from starvation, unconsciousness would be extremely likely, so "I'm starving to the point of death" would be (if accurate) an unlikely statement.

I agree with the top answer to some extent, but it only addresses the past tense:

• 
  Steve starved to death: This means Steve died, and the cause of death was starvation.


• 
  Steve starved to the point of death: This means that Steve starved so much that he was about to die. He may have then gone on to die, or survived after all, depending on whether he immediately obtained food at that point (but it is heavily implied that he survived by the fact that you did not simply say "starved to death").

You question was about the present it misses that your question is about the present participle ("starving"):

• 
  Steve is starving to death: This means that Steve has not yet starved to death, but he is on the way there. In other words, he is before the point of death. This is like the difference between "Steve is playing cricket" vs "Steve played cricket".


• 
  Steve is starving to the point of death: Steve has not yet starved to the point of death, but he is on his way they.

Now it is hopefully clear that "I am starving to the point of death" is an odd construction. It is like saying "Steve is walking towards the edge of London (from the outside)". Sure, it may be true, but why not just say "Steve is walking towards London"? It is simpler, and neither of them say where you will stop.

It is still hyperbole to say that you're "starving to death", but not because it's claiming that you have already died. Instead, it is because the fact that you mention death (or starvation) implies that it is a genuine concern, when it presumably is not. To say that you're "starving to the point of death" is exactly the same degree of hyperbole but more awkwardly phrased.