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Look up and/or in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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 is 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—by many style guides, including the classic The Elements of Style (from William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White)—and ambiguous in legal documents—by American and British courts.
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 –recognized by Time one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923, [6] 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". [7]
The phrase has come under criticism in both American and British courts. [8] [9] Judges have called it a "freakish fad", an "accuracy-destroying symbol", and "meaningless". [8] 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". [10] The Kentucky Supreme Court has said it was a "much-condemned conjunctive-disjunctive crutch of sloppy thinkers". [8] 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. [11]
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. [12]
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. [13] Courts called on to interpret it have applied a wide variety of standards, with little agreement. [14]
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".
The Elements of Style is a style guide to writing American English, published in numerous editions. The original was written by William Strunk Jr. in 1918, and published by Harcourt in 1920, comprising eight "elementary rules of usage," ten "elementary principles of composition," "a few matters of form," a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused," and a list of 57 "words often misspelled." Writer and editor E. B. White greatly enlarged and revised the book for publication by Macmillan in 1959. That was the first edition of the book, which Time recognized in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential non-fiction books written in English since 1923.
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.
Linguistic prescription, also called prescriptivism or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often propagate the belief that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.
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, the serial comma, also referred to as the series comma, Oxford comma, or Harvard comma, is a comma placed immediately after the penultimate term and before the coordinating conjunction in a series of three or more terms. For instance, a list of three countries might be punctuated without the serial comma as "France, Italy and Spain" or with the serial comma as "France, Italy, and Spain". The serial comma can serve to avoid ambiguity in specific contexts, though its employment may also generate ambiguity under certain circumstances.
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.
Relative clauses in the English language are formed principally by means of relative words. The basic relative pronouns are who, which, and that; who also has the derived forms whom and whose. Various grammatical rules and style guides determine which relative pronouns may be suitable in various situations, especially for formal settings. In some cases the relative pronoun may be omitted and merely implied.
In English, the passive voice is marked by a subject that is followed by a stative verb complemented by a past participle. For example:
The enemy was defeated. Caesar was stabbed.
The Latin adverb sic inserted after a quotation indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed or translated as found in the source text, including erroneous, archaic, or unusual spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Sic also applies to any surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might be interpreted as an error of transcription.
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.
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.
The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the en dash–, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash—, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar―, whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.
In common usage and linguistics, concision is a communication principle of eliminating redundancy, generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts that impart information that was already given, that is obvious or that is irrelevant. Outside of linguistics, a message may be similarly "dense" in other forms of communication.
Verbosity, or verboseness, is speech or writing that uses more words than necessary. The opposite of verbosity is succinctness.