And.......And

[Ghost Post]

How can five consecutive and's in one sentance and make sence? and is used in it;s singular form.

[Andy]

I tried some variations with 'and' and 'and and'. 'And and' and 'and' are just two variations. (Oops, that's 8!)

John, where James had had 'had', had had 'had had'. 'Had had' had had the teacher's approval. (The original author had 11.)

[Murray]

What exactly is the plural form of "and"?

[daniel801]

it's "or"

[Amy]

The editor said, "Put more space between 'king' and 'and,' and 'and' and 'queen.'"

At least that's the way I heard it. In reality, it would probably be the page layout person who asked for a change in the line spacing (rather than the editor, who deals with content).

[Tom]

Why is "or" the plural of "and"?

I would imagine, since we are allowing "and" to be used as a noun (meaning "the word and") that the plural would be "ands" in this case; presumably "or" is supposed to be the plural form of "and" as a conjunction. The only other way I know that you can use "and" is as an infinitive ("try and see", is an example of this.)

[Murray]

I think daniel801 was joking in response to my joke. Obviously "or" is not the plural of "and." You may be right that since "and" is used as a noun that "ands" is the plural form referred to. I.e., no sentences like, "You've overused 'ors' and 'ands,' and 'ands' and 'ors' are not to be overused." Of course, in that sentence you could just use "and" singular and it would still read fine.

I'm curious why you think "and" is infinitival in "try and see." Deep down, syntax is full of tricky questions, but it seems to me that it is just a simple conjunction here--the mental structure of which is something like "[You] try and [you (will)] see." This sentence is certainly more complicated than, say, "go and look," which is obviously using "and" as a conjunction to attach the null-subject of the phrase "[You] go" to the second verb, "look." But I'm not so sure that just because there is a change in tenses in "try and see" that "and" is necessarily anything more than an ordinary conjunction. It may just be that the auxilliary verb "will" is null, just as the subject is. This, in fact, sounds likely to me since one can't say "try and will see," and not get looked at funny.

[Ghost Post]

Murray and Tom --

The [and] in [try and see] is most certainly not an "ordinary conjunction", although calling it infinitival is, at best, vague. The phenomenon of an [and] not serving the role of conjunction was called (I believe) hendyadis by the old grammarians. We use it often with adjectives, as in [nice and warm] or [good and ready], as well as with the verb [try]. Also probably in [big and fat] and arguably in [go and f*** yourself].

It seems to me that the adjectival hendyadis is a very different phenomenon from the [try] hendyadis, though. Semantically, [try] has a modal function, and [try and see] is semantically almost identical to [try to see]. I suspect that [try and...] expressions are created at the level of phoenetics, not syntax, because it doesn't appear with phoenetically different declensions of [try], e.g. no [I tried and saw], [He tries and sees], but we can say {I'm gonna try and see].

[hank]

Hendyadis? I checked two dictionaries and couldn"t find it. I checked the world wide web and came up with two French sites. My curiosity regarding this obscure grammatical term has been piqued. Could some one try and see if they could elaborate on the use of this word?

[Murray]

On a hunch I tried "hendiadis"--came up some stuff. First of all, there's a great page of tropes:

http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/peacham.htm

And here is the hendiadis-specific page:

http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/hendiady.htm

I always loved this stuff.

However, tropes are a literary thing and the "try and see" thing is a linguistics issue. I'm gonna think on it some more. I was really playing devil's advocate before. I do think that there's something more than a simple conjunction in the phrase, but I wanted to see why someone might think it was infinitival because, well, it's not that either.

I disagree that "try and see" is symantically close to "try to see"--it can be, but not usually. If I say, "I'm going to try and see," I mean I'm going to do something and hope for results--"I'm going to try [it] and see [what happens]." But if I say, "I'm going to try to see," I'm saying "I'm going to attempt to get a better look."

Of course, we can say "He tried to see" and "We're trying to see," but we can't say either "He tried and see" nor "He tried and saw." So, as has been noted, the phenomenon is idiosyncratic to "try" here. Since that's the case, then a good bet is that "try and see" is a singular linguistic component--no more divisible than, say, the word "jump." It seems likely that "try and see" is a complex verb of some sort.

[Amy]

But "try" is not the only verb that can function in this peculiar way. How about "come and see"? It translates roughly the same way: "Come, and you will see."

I was noting in Ellis W's other examples that the phrases "nice and warm" and "good and ready" seem to use the first adjective to modify the second. That is, "nice and warm" means roughly the same thing as "nicely warm," and "good and ready" the same thing as "well ready." (I disagree, however, that the "and" in "big and fat" is anything other than an ordinary conjunction, however. The sentence "He is big and fat" means the same thing as the sentence "He is big and he is fat.") So it seems to me that this is actually *another* unconventional use of the word "and," distinct from the unconventional use in "try and see."

[Murray]

I agree with that, Amy. The link I posted on "hendiadis" lends credence to this, i.e. "nice and warm" is constructed by converting the adjective "nicely warm" to "nice and warm."

"Try and see" is definitely a different sort of creature, of which "come and see" may be a relative. There are several examples in linguistics of strange, idiosyncratic phrases that really can't be dissected. I'm gonna check some of my linguisics books when I get home (if I remember), but this is a pretty specific problem so I doubt I'll have any luck.

[pikachamp]

how about this

And And and And And.

I am talking about two people named And with last names And

i think they're brothers

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riddle me this riddle me that oh come on riddle me!

[Sofis]

Poor kids.

[vipper_sc_2000]

Wow, you people realy get into this stuff huh? (please dont correct my grammar) Dont think I'm being a jerk jus an observation.

[yoda]

There is no try, only do