and/or

A neologism that stretches our language in new ways. We are privileged to have a language that is so adaptable. Writing systems are always more conservative than speech for the obvious reason that writing by definition is durable and we have to maintain continuity with older documents. I'm sure "bird house" was originally written that way, then became "bird-house" and finally "birdhouse." Corporations struggle to keep their trademarks from losing their capital letter--although Bayer AG is not complaining about "heroin."

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I'm sure lawyers invented and/or so they "spelled" it with a virgule instead of a hyphen.

Anglophones have lately taken to expanding the paradigms of their language, which is good. Unlike Chinese, which has only nouns and verbs, our Stone Age array of prepositions, conjunctions and inflections with all their intricate grammatical rules hinders us in coining new terms for new types of relationships. We finally gave up and made English even more of a "synthetic" language than it already is, by making up combinations like user-friendly, labor-intensive and fuel-efficient. These are so much more "language-efficient" than following the rules and saying "sensitive to the needs of users," "heavily dependent on labor" or "parsimonoius in the consumption of fuel." Perhaps our descendants will write "userfriendly."

I call "and/or" a word but if you call it a phrase it's a matter of taste. I suppose it's a compound word, but so is "birdhouse" and it seems to be a matter of no import in the analysis of Modern English.

Whatever it is, and/or is definitely a conjunction and must connect two nouns, verbs, phrases, clauses, or any two things of identical type. "In 2008 our firm will open a branch office in Sydney and/or Shanghai." "The police will interrogate the witness and/or detain him."

That was tried back in the 1970s, when we were also experimenting with s/he for he/she. It never caught on. (Neither did s/he.) I think the problem was that "and/or" is pronounced as two words, "and or" so both syllables have equal stress. "Andor" demands to have only one stressed syllable and since native Anglo-Saxon words usually stress the first syllable, it comes out of our mouths as AN-der and nobody knows what we're talking about. (Most of us subvocalize when we're reading so we get just as confused silently.) (S/he is even worse because it's not clear how to pronounce it at all. "ESS-hee"? "She or hee"? "Shhhhhheeeeeee"?)

I suspect this may be a bigger problem in British usage; we Americans don't compress our speech as much as they do. We pronounce the name "Mordor" in Lord of the Rings as MOR - DOR. I've been told that the Brits are more likely to say MOR-der. (Well actually the Scots say it that way but the English tend to be non-rhotic so they say MOAH-dah.)

Absolutely not. And/or is a word that was specifically coined to express the logical relationship INCLUSIVE OR.

If you say A AND B, only the following condition is valid: both A and B are present. This is what BOTH means.

If you say A OR B in a computer language, three conditions are valid: Only A is present; only B is present; both A and B are present.

But if you say A OR B in everyday speech, it could be interpreted the same as computer language, or it could be interpreted that only two conditions are valid: Only A is present; only B is present. Both A and B is invalid. In computer language we call that an EXCLUSIVE OR, often coded as XOR.

We needed a term in everyday speech that makes it clear we mean INCLUSIVE OR, so and/or was created.

We don't have a convenient term for EXCLUSIVE OR, but at least we have a cumbersome one: Either A or B but not both. Hey it works.