Saturday, June 6, 2020

A Conjunct is not a Conjunction

In answer to a teacher's question what a conjunction is, a young child replies with some confidence that it is the sign you see at a road junction. That is what I read a long time ago in a newspaper and I can't now remember if it's a true story or just a joke but I am fairly certain that if you direct this same question to the general public, quite a few people will not be able to define a conjunction correctly. I get a lot of emails sent through this blog but because there are so many of them, I usually make no reply although I skim through as many emails as I can. Recently, I read some of the older ones and I noticed that curiously, quite a few of my readers have questions that relate in some way to the conjunction.

One reader is confused why in a list of what appeared to him to be correct sentences,  he was told that the only correct sentence was