(neither) nor

[Jonathan Lighter]

Sounds stupid though it's not unprecedented. It contains one less place than the alternative. Or maybe the editor doesn't like to start a headline with a negative.

Two thumbs down.

JL

Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU> wrote: ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender:       American Dialect Society
Poster:       Beverly Flanigan
Subject:      Re: (neither) nor
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How about this headline from our local newspaper today:
"All homeowners shouldn't be bailed out" (on the sub-prime loan issue),
meaning "Not all homeowners should be bailed out."
How do these stand with you all?

At 12:51 PM 5/8/2007, you wrote:
>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society
>Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky"
>Subject:      Re: (neither) nor
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On May 8, 2007, at 9:33 AM, Michael Covarrubias wrote:
>
> > I've been writing little bits and pieces about the "nor" recently.
> > Interesting
> > to note that in addition to deletion of an initial negative there
> > are times when
> > this coordination jumps categories. Sometimes it's a very awkward
> > union as in:
> >
> > "I have neither friends nor have enemies."
> >
> > That sentence sounds very wrong partly because the first "neither"
> > negates the
> > noun "friends" and the corresponding "nor" applies to the verb
> > "have". But it's
> > probably _mostly_ because the second "have" sounds repetitive.
> > Consider the
> > following that has a similar non-parallel structure but avoids the
> > repetition:
> >
> > "I have neither friends nor do I want any."
> >
> > Not a great sentence but it's okay.
>
>Philip Hofmeister at Stanford has looked at non-parallelism in
>"either... or" -- with the "either" located 'too high' or 'too low'.
>here are two versions of his analysis:
>
>http://www.stanford.edu/~philiph/ellipsis&either.pdf
>
>http://www.stanford.edu/~philiph/either_linearization.pdf
>
>there are similar "neither... nor" and "both... and" examples.
>
>arnold
>
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