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A Few 'Language Miniatures'

And What's All This?

'What a word means' is not all that simple

Often it does mean no more than that: apples and oranges, paper and pencil, and an endless number of other pairs of things, where one is simply grouped with the other, in either order. We can as easily say oranges and apples, pencil and paper. Of course some don't reverse quite as comfortably, but they don't sound too odd. Try black and white or shoes and stockings.

Likewise we can join phrases, such as They arrested Tom for d.w.i. and Harry for burglary. Here it seems either order will do. But the two sides of 'and' don't reverse so comfortably in They convicted them and sentenced them to jail, where we can't escape a certain sequence. If you say We drove five miles and stopped to eat, aren't you saying more than just that one thing is added to another? You seem to be implying AND THEN. Since you're talking about a sequence in time, reversing the order is out of the question.

What do you mean when you say I looked and looked? Hunting on two separate occasions? No, here the 'and' just means it was drawn out. Occasionally 'and' doesn't just join two adjectives, but turns one of them into an adverb like -LY: nice and soft, good and thick. And if you say Well, there are repairmen and repairmen, you assume everyone will understand you mean some are good and others are bad. How do we all know this right away, when all you've really said is 'repairmen + more repairmen'?

And then there's an expression like He set out for New York and ended up in Baltimore. There's an abrupt and unexpected break between the two, something more like BUT. You might even mean a positively preposterous combination: Him and punctual? Gimme a break! This is getting a bit remote from that simple PLUS. When you say Laugh and the world laughs with you, you're making it clear that the second is a direct CONSEQUENCE of the first. How is it you had no trouble understanding what this relation on both sides of the 'and' was? (Hint: the 'and' here joins an imperative and a declarative. Try a few more and see if it always works).

Sometimes the first member of the pair joined by 'and' is only out in the physical world, and not expressed at all. Imagine yourself standing looking at your car with a flat tire. You say in disgust And I just bought that tire yesterday!. Why did you start with 'and'? It seems you're joining something like Now I discover a flat tire, and [=but] I just bought ... By the way, what was that 'and' doing at the beginning of the title above?

Let's go back to those pairs of words that don't reverse their order comfortably. There are dozens of pairs with 'and' in which no speaker of English would reverse the order at all: north and south, hill and dale, this and that. Possibly our resistance to reversing the order has something to do with our culture's deep-seated preference for 'up' over 'down', for 'close' over 'distant' and the like. Or our preference for hearing the 'thinner-sounding' vowel first: zigging and zagging, gin and tonic.

Not infrequently our innocent-looking 'and' even has the power to override the distinction between subject and object forms. There's a noticeable tendency in English to regard two personal pronouns joined by 'and' as unchangeable units. In some forms of colloquial speech you've heard people say Him and me know it - speakers who would never say 'him knows' or 'me knows' but only he knows and I know. This use of object pronouns as subjects in the presence of 'and' is stigmatized by speakers of English as something like 'uneducated', (but notice that in standard Academy French, this exact same construction is obligatory: il dort and je dors 'he sleeps, I sleep', but lui et moi dormons 'he and I [lit. 'him and me'] sleep').

Others who speak English do just the opposite, using only subject forms when pronouns are joined by 'and'. People who would never dream of saying 'for she' or 'for I' will not hesitate to say They did it for she and I. By the way, there is nothing recent about this: In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare has "between you and I" (Act III Sc. 2).

The word 'and' clearly means one thing, and yet manages to produce a wide variety of 'meanings'. Is this a paradox?

"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra." (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass).

Humpty Dumpty notwithstanding, a word does not 'have' a meaning like the numbers printed on his banknotes. All these specific implications we have been looking at have little to do with the word 'and' itself. All 'and' does is indicate a sort of generic togetherness, placing the burden of all the rest of our understanding entirely on the words on both sides.

Our intimate knowledge of this, and of the physical and social situation surrounding the sentence, means that we grasp the relationship being communicated effortlessly. Like all words, 'and' too participates in an intricate network of meanings.

All essays Copyright © 1998-2004 by William Z. Shetter
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