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Look up and/or in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
And/or (sometimes written and or) is an English grammatical conjunction used to indicate that one or more (or even all) of the cases it connects may occur. It's used as an inclusive or (as in logic and mathematics), because saying "or" in spoken language (or writing "or") might be inclusive or exclusive.
The construction has been used in official, legal and business documents since the mid-19th century, and evidence of broader use appears in the 20th century. [1] It has been criticized as both ugly in style and ambiguous in legal documents. Many style guides recommend against it.
Two alternatives have been proposed. The first is to (for just two items) replace and/or with "x or y or both." [2] [3] [4] The second is to simply choose which of and or or to use. [4]
The word or does not entail mutual exclusivity by itself. The word either can be used to convey mutual exclusivity. "When using either as a conjunction, [it can be applied] to more than two elements in a series." [5] Thus,
"He will eat either cake, pie, or brownies"
appropriately indicates that the choices are mutually exclusive. If the function of or is clear from the context, it is not necessary to use either as a conjunction:[ citation needed ]
Person 1: You may select one item for dessert.
Person 2: What are my choices?
Person 1: You may eat cake, pie, or brownies.
References on English usage strongly criticize the phrase as "ugly" [2] and "Janus-faced". [4] William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, in their classic The Elements of Style , say and/or is "A device, or shortcut, that damages a sentence and often leads to confusion or ambiguity". [3] Roy H. Copperud, in A Dictionary of Usage and Style, says that the phrase is "Objectionable to many, who regard it as a legalism". [6]
The phrase has come under criticism in both American and British courts. [7] [8] Judges have called it a "freakish fad", an "accuracy-destroying symbol", and "meaningless". [7] In a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion from 1935, Justice Fowler referred to it as "that befuddling, nameless thing, that Janus-faced verbal monstrosity, neither word nor phrase, the child of a brain of someone too lazy or too dull to know what he did mean". [9] The Kentucky Supreme Court has said it was a "much-condemned conjunctive-disjunctive crutch of sloppy thinkers". [7] Finally, the Florida Supreme Court has denounced the use of "and/or", stating
...we take our position with that distinguished company of lawyers who have condemned its use. It is one of those inexcusable barbarisms which were sired by indolence and damned by indifference, and has no more place in legal terminology than the vernacular of Uncle Remus has in Holy Writ. I am unable to divine how such senseless jargon becomes current. The coiner of it certainly had no appreciation for terse and concise law English. [10]
Other authorities point out that it is usually quite unambiguous and can be the most efficient way to indicate the inclusive or in some contexts. Kenneth Adams, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and Alan S. Kaye, professor of linguistics at California State University, write, "It does, after all, have a specific meaning—X and/or Y means X or Y or both." However, the authors state that it should not be used in language of obligation. [11]
The legal usage authority Bryan A. Garner stated that use of the term is particularly harmful in legal writing because a bad-faith reader of a contract can pick whichever suits them, the and or the or. [12] Courts called on to interpret it have applied a wide variety of standards, with little agreement. [13]
In logic, disjunction, also known as logical disjunction or logical or or logical addition or inclusive disjunction, is a logical connective typically notated as and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is sunny or it is warm" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula , assuming that abbreviates "it is sunny" and abbreviates "it is warm".
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
The comma, is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure 9 on the baseline.
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects words, phrases, or clauses that are called the conjuncts of the conjunctions. That definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, and so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each language. In English, a given word may have several senses, and be either a preposition or a conjunction depending on the syntax of the sentence. For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but is a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariable (non-inflected) grammatical particle that may or may not stand between the items conjoined.
A dangling modifier is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dangling modifier has no subject and is usually a participle. A writer may use a dangling modifier intending to modify a subject while word order may imply that the modifier describes an object, or vice versa.
While is a word in the English language that functions both as a noun and as a subordinating conjunction. Its meaning varies largely based on its intended function, position in the phrase and even the writer or speaker's regional dialect. As a conjunction, it is synonymous with the word whilst, a form often considered archaic in American English, as well as in some style guides on both sides of the Atlantic.
In English-language punctuation, a serial comma is a comma placed immediately after the penultimate term in a series of three or more terms. For example, a list of three countries might be punctuated as either "France, Italy and Spain" or "France, Italy, and Spain".
In written English usage, a comma splice or comma fault is the use of a comma to join two independent clauses. For example:
It is nearly half past five, we cannot reach town before dark.
A misnomer is a name that is incorrectly or unsuitably applied. Misnomers often arise because something was named long before its correct nature was known, or because an earlier form of something has been replaced by a later form to which the name no longer suitably applies. A misnomer may also be simply a word that someone uses incorrectly or misleadingly. The word "misnomer" does not mean "misunderstanding" or "popular misconception", and a number of misnomers remain in common usage — which is to say that a word being a misnomer does not necessarily make usage of the word incorrect.
The Latin adverb sic inserted after a quoted word or passage indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed or translated exactly as found in the source text, complete with any erroneous, archaic, or otherwise nonstandard spelling, punctuation, or grammar. It also applies to any surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might be interpreted as an error of transcription.
Legal English is the type of English as used in legal writing. In general, a legal language is a formalized language based on logic rules which differs from the ordinary natural language in vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as other linguistic features, aimed to achieve consistency, validity, completeness and soundness, while keeping the benefits of a human-like language such as intuitive execution, complete meaning, and open upgrade. However, Legal English has been referred to as a "sublanguage", as Legal English differs from ordinary English. A specialized use of certain terms and linguistic patterns governs the teaching of legal language. Thus, "we study legal language as a kind of second language, a specialized use of vocabulary, phrases, and syntax that helps us to communicate more easily with each other".
Bryan Andrew Garner is an American legal scholar and lexicographer. He has written more than two dozen books about English usage and style such as Garner's Modern English Usage for a general audience, and others for legal professionals. Garner also wrote two books with Justice Antonin Scalia: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges (2008) and Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012). He is the founder and president of LawProse Inc.
In linguistics, clusivity is a grammatical distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we". Inclusive "we" specifically includes the addressee, while exclusive "we" specifically excludes the addressee; in other words, two words that both translate to "we", one meaning "you and I, and possibly someone else", the other meaning "me and some other person or persons, but not you". While imagining that this sort of distinction could be made in other persons is straightforward, in fact the existence of second-person clusivity in natural languages is controversial and not well attested. While clusivity is not a feature of standard English language, it is found in many languages around the world.
Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU), written by Bryan A. Garner and published by Oxford University Press, is a usage dictionary and style guide for contemporary Modern English. It was first published in 1998 as A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, with a focus on American English, which it retained for the next two editions as Garner's Modern American Usage (GMAU). It was expanded to cover English more broadly in the 2016 fourth edition, under the present title. The work covers issues of usage, pronunciation, and style, from distinctions among commonly confused words and phrases to notes on how to prevent verbosity and obscurity. In addition, it contains essays about the English language. An abridged version of the first edition was also published as The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style in 2000 and a similar version was published in The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition in 2017. The latter includes three sections titled "Grammar", "Syntax" and "Word Usage", each with several subcategories.
A legal doublet is a standardized phrase used frequently in English legal language consisting of two or more words that are irreversible binomials and frequently synonyms, usually connected by "and", such as "null and void". The order of the words cannot be reversed, as it would be particularly unusual to ask someone to desist and cease or to have property owned clear and free; these common legal phrases are universally known as cease and desist and free and clear.
A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of appositive phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalistic writing. It formally resembles a title, in that it does not start with an article, but is a common noun phrase, not a title. An example is the phrase convicted bomber in "convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh", rather than "the convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh".
Justice is an honorific style and title traditionally used to describe a jurist who is currently serving or has served within a supreme court or some equal position. In some countries, a justice may have had prior experience as a judge or may have been appointed with no prior judicial experience. It is predominantly used today in the United States to distinguish those who serve on the Supreme Court of the United States from judges who serve on a lower court. Other countries, such as New Zealand and India, similarly use the title as a form of address for members of their highest courts.