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Tag Archives: pedantry

The answer is obvious

Geoff Pullum asks if “and/or” means “and AND or” or “and OR or”, and decides for the latter.

Well, duh. Clearly it means “and AND/OR or”.

(He does have a point though: if you think like a logician, it’s clearly an unnecessary connective. “And AND or” is logically equivalent to “and”, while “and OR or” is logically [...]

Semanticists at lunch

Studying semantics doesn’t give you much to laugh at, most of the time. In fact, rather the reverse: being too aware of what words mean, you start to miss what people mean when they say them. Anyone confronted with “Oh, it’s funny because…” has probably just told a joke to a semanticist. But there are [...]