(neither) nor

[Jonathan Lighter]

I was so accustomed to writing "neither...or" deep into high school that even now "neither...nor" feels formal.  Neither construction is often heard in everyday speech.

The loss of "neither," however, strikes me as quite odd; I can't recall ever seeing it in a student paper.

"Nor...nor," of course, is/was a (chiefly?) poetic alternative.

JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote: ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender:       American Dialect Society
Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject:      Re: (neither) nor
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On May 8, 2007, at 8:24 AM, i wrote:

> On May 8, 2007, at 7:25 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>
>> Has anyone ever heard this kind of phrase sans "neither":
>> "Kent Smith nor anyone from that office was present . . . ."
>> The meaning was clearly "neither KS nor anyone else ...."
>
> lovely.  surely there are more cites to be found.

and so there are.  OED (draft revision 2003), 2.b. under nor conj.1,
has examples without the other negative expressed, from the Townley
Plays (a1500) on to Byron, Tennyson, and Faulkner, though it labels
the usage "now rare".  the 19th and 20th century examples are poetic.

i'd guess that there are vernacular examples out there that escaped
the OED's readers.

arnold

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