So You Think You Understand
Language
By Jon N. Hall
The mathematician John von
Neumann once said: “Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You
just get used to them.” The same sort of thing might also be said about
language -- you don't understand language, you just get used to it.
But with language, it may be
even more the case than with mathematics. That’s because folks often have to
invert the true meanings of words in order to grasp what they’re hearing, i.e. what’s
intended. When one thinks about it for a bit, language itself can seem rather
mystifying -- better to just use it, right?
Not if one is trying to be
exact. It is for the sake of exactness and precision that we create “usage
rules.” But we Anglophones need better usage rules for some of the most common words
in English: conjunctions. Conjunctions can create ambiguity, and in some arenas
of contemporary life, like law, ambiguity can’t be tolerated. Sad to say, but
we Anglophones have gotten a wee bit too “used” to bad usage, at least when it
comes to conjunctions. Consider the conjunction “nor.”
In “Words and Expressions
Commonly Misused,” Chapter IV of the fourth edition of Strunk and White’s
celebrated The Elements
of Style, the entry for “nor”
(p. 41) asserts this about the word: “Often used wrongly for or after negative expressions.”
Though others have echoed
this bit of wisdom in honored grammars and usage guides over the last century
or so, it is entirely wrong. The example Elements
gives for this supposedly incorrect usage is: “He cannot eat nor sleep.” Elements advises replacing the “nor”
with “or.” So consider these:
He cannot eat nor sleep.
He cannot eat or sleep.
He cannot eat and sleep.
If they are not tasked with
thinking about them and merely hear them casually, I contend that most
Anglophones will interpret these three examples the same way. If so, that is
absurd, as the three conjunctions stipulate three conflicting things: neither, either,
and both, respectively. Yet, Anglophones often use (and hear) these
conjunctions as though they were interchangeable.
Although all three sentences
are grammatical, it is the “nor” example that is the least ambiguous. Yet,
that’s the example that riles up the language experts. Also, word processing
programs seem to flag “nor” more than “and” and “or.” Word processors probably
shouldn’t flag any of our three conjunctions at all unless they are paired with
the wrong correlative conjunctions, such as “neither” with “or.”
What is the difference
between Elements’ “incorrect” example
(“He cannot eat nor sleep”) and this: “He can neither eat nor sleep”? Both contain a leading negative (“cannot”
and “can neither”), so shouldn’t both demand the same conjunction? Moreover, isn’t “He can eat nor sleep” grammatical?
Contrary to Stunk and White, “nor”
is the conjunction that is least often misused. But I’d like to show one
instance of its misuse that may rile folks, because its source is rightly
etched into our brains as an example of soaring prose. Don’t hate me,
but it’s in Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”: “The world will little note, nor
long remember what we say here.”
What some don’t appreciate
about “nor” is that it negates whatever it connects. “Nor” negates not only
what follows it but also what precedes it, regardless of whether or not there
is a leading negative, like “neither.”
What Lincoln was literally
saying is that the world will not little
note. What Lincoln surely meant was: The world will neither much note, nor long remember. Or, if he wanted to continue
with his attenuation, he could have written: The world will little note, and soon forget. Or, if he wanted a mix
of attenuation and negation: The world will little note, and not long remember.
Although such usage is now
less common, the online Oxford English
Dictionary confirms this: “nor” doesn’t require a leading negative. In the
OED’s entry for “nor,” we find this from Tennyson: “Great brother, thou nor I have made the world.”
Their latest example is from 2007 in Advocate:
“I, nor my management, have ever had any kind of
problem with creating a gay character.” So Lincoln would have been
grammatical had he written: The world will
note nor remember. (In any event, Lincoln was wrong -- we still note and
remember what he said.)
A logician once told me that
“and” is the least ambiguous conjunction. But “and” can be ambiguous, too, so
consider this: A mother has to leave the house for a minute to post some mail
and she tells her eldest child, her five-year-old son: Don’t tease your brother
and sister while I’m outside. The mother posts her mail and when she returns
from the mail box finds her youngest, the daughter, in tears. She says to her
eldest: I thought I told you not to tease your brother and sister. The boy
replies: I didn’t, I teased only one.
Take the old joke about the
guy who can’t walk and chew gum. Actually, he can walk and chew gum, just not at
the same time. So to drive the joke home, one must add the qualification. A
similar problem would arise with our example from Elements if we substitute “and” for “nor”: He cannot eat and sleep. You see, eating and sleeping aren’t
usually done simultaneously.
If “nor” presents the fewest
problems of our three conjunctions, then “or” is probably the most problematic.
I’ve touched on the problems with “or” in an article for lawyers on “and/or”: “Helping Lawyers with Their Prose.” It’s short and there are some links to PDF
reference books that you might want to save.
Formal logic (i.e. mathematical logic) provides
a way around the ambiguity inherent in “natural languages,” like
English. The three conjunctions under consideration here each have their own
analog in formal logic. But not only does formal logic have analogs for English
conjunctions, so do computer programming languages, and so does the hardware in
computers, which have separate “logic
gates” (electronic circuits). If
ambiguity can be banned in computers, shouldn’t usage experts be able to devise
guides to do the same for language?
Assuming it were possible, it
would be most undesirable to root out all ambiguity from the English language.
For one thing, humor would be dead. But we should at least have guides to help
us avoid ambiguity when that’s really needed, such as when drafting a contract
or a treaty. But I’ll be damned if I can find such guides. Indeed, one wonders
if the language experts even recognize the ambiguity inherent in their own
recommendations.
Some very sophisticated,
elegant thinkers, people I admire, misuse conjunctions all the time. But that’s
not what’s as concerning as the fact that some language experts are offering
illogical advice on the matter of conjunctions. For instance, there seems to be
a trend for “or” to be paired with the correlative “neither.” If that’s legit,
then so is this: Either eat your vegetables nor
get no dessert.
In June of 2013 at Columbia Journalism Review, Merrill
Perlman delved into this trend in an article headlined “Neither regions.”
The article is short and fun, and it’s worth reading because it shows that the language
experts often disagree.
Here’s the deal, a
conjunction doesn’t just connect words, it specifies whether one is referring
to one, none, all, or some indefinite number. One would like to think that
one’s fellow Anglophones could at least be clear about how many of the items on
a list they are thinking about and thus use the correct conjunction, but that
seems to be too much to ask for nowadays. A bit of advice:
Never allow yourself to get
totally “used” to language.
Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON
OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.
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