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

 I had a headache; therefore, I took some medicine.

As I read through his email, I soon saw that his confusion arose from a total misunderstanding of the difference between a conjunction and a conjunct.  A simple reminder that a conjunct is not a conjunction will solve all his problems. This is how easy it is to answer questions about English usage. You just have to be clear about what you are dealing with and everything falls neatly into its place. I hope the reader who sent me his email on 15 October last year and many other readers who sent me emails with questions on the conjunction are reading this post. The problems they encounter are almost always due to a simple misunderstanding of the different functions of words and phrases and this justifies my earlier blog post condemning linguists who come up with outlandish analyses of the language and have their own new classifications that are not recognised by the rest of the world. I have argued in that blog post that these linguists (there are, thankfully, just a couple of them) are extinguishing the small spark of interest the world now has for grammar.

Another reader has an issue with some conjuncts which are used to coordinate clauses and I perfectly sympathise with him. I do find them unbearably distasteful myself but we must remember that our taste should not be the arbiter of what good grammar is. He and I are not the only ones who find them unsightly. Many of us frown on them and relegate them to the 'informal speech' category or worse, brand those who use them as 'illiterate'. What most of us who disapprove of such a usage can't quite understand is this senseless aversion to the complex conjunction which even the armed robber in the picture below, despite his need for speed and succinctness, uses. It is so much more comprehensible and I very much doubt if his listener will feign ignorance and insist that the ellipted 'I'll kill you' isn't loudly and eloquently conveyed by the revolver pointed at him!

But however distasteful or inelegant it may be to us, Burchfield reminds us that this quasi-conjunctive use of 'else' has the backing of antiquity - it can be traced to the Middle Ages and he also gives an example from Spenser in 1596 and he marks such use as 'obsolete'. More recently, Jeremy Butterfield wrote in 2016 that it is now 'archaic but is still found in informal speech'. Will it be fully accepted one day?

I always remind myself that the pages of linguistic history are full of examples of people kicking against the pricks and insisting that an obsolete usage should not make a comeback. Most of us don't like any change. Neither do we like the language to move forward and evolve. When I was a boy, I was chided for using 'due to' as a complex preposition. Because my knowledge of grammar then was patchy, I was not even sure what a complex preposition was, and so I simply avoided it altogether. But the reluctance to accept it as a complex preposition in the 20th century is not surprising when just a century before, 'owing to' underwent the same fate.

But as long as the English language continues to be used, grammar Nazis (defined in this blog as grammar ignoramuses who are waiting to pounce on anyone for flouting non-existent grammatical rules or grammatical rules invented by other grammar ignoramuses) will always have something to say.

For a list of posts about grammar Nazis and other language-related matters, please click here.