Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Conjunction Superiority
Do you ever get in one of those moods? Yeah, me too.
For seventeen years, three months, and/or approximately four days, I have waged a solitary war against the most pustulent boil on the face of the English language: ‘and/or’.
This Frankensteinian abomination β this typographical hedge-sitting β this coward’s conjunction β has haunted my waking hours like a particularly persistent creditor. Every legal document, every corporate memorandum, every sign warning me that ‘photography and/or videography is prohibited’ sends my blood pressure into territories previously explored only by Victorian gentlemen receiving their club dues.
The Problem with And/Or (Shudder)
Let us be brutally honest: ‘and/or’ is what happens when a language gives up. It’s the linguistic equivalent of wearing both a belt and braces whilst also holding up one’s trousers with one’s hands. Pick a lane, for heaven’s sake.
The Americans might tolerate such fence-sitting β they elected [REDACTED] after all; their electoral history speaks for itself, but we can do better. We must do better.
Enter: XAND
After years of painstaking research (three Wikipedia articles and a fever dream following some dodgy prawns), I have developed the solution: XAND.
Pronounced ‘zand’, naturally β /zΛΓ¦nd/. None of this ‘ex-and’ nonsense β we’re not animals.
Why XAND?
- It’s exclusive OR from Boolean logic, but spiritually elevated: Computer scientists have XOR (exclusive or). Mathematicians have β. We now have XAND β combining AND and OR with the mystique of algebra and the pretension of using X in anything to make it sound more sophisticated.
- It’s properly British: That X gives it a whiff of the obscure, like ‘Cholmondeley’ being pronounced ‘Chumley’. Foreigners won’t know how to use it. Perfect.
- It looks like a Roman numeral had a midlife crisis: X + AND = gravitas with just a hint of desperation. Rather like myself.
- It’s trademarked in my mind palace: I’ve already designed the letterhead XANDβ’.
Usage Examples
Before (Neanderthal): ‘Please bring your passport and/or driver’s license’
After (Enlightened): ‘Please bring your passport XAND driver’s license’
See? You can feel your IQ rising. That’s not a stroke; that’s sophistication.
Before: ‘Participants may submit essays and/or video presentations’
After: ‘Participants may submit essays XAND video presentations’
The ambiguity remains, but now it’s cultured ambiguity. Like a good sherry.
The XAND Lifestyle
Since adopting XAND in my personal correspondence, I’ve noticed several changes:
- My solicitor has stopped returning my calls
- I’ve been uninvited from three book clubs
- My wife has suggested ‘taking some time apart’
- I feel more alive than I have any right to.
Join the Revolution
Some said I was barking mad. My therapist said I was ‘fixating unhealthily’. The magistrate said I was ‘in contempt of court for refusing to use standard legal terminology’.
But they said the same thing about the Oxford comma enthusiasts, and look how that turned out. (Still arguing on the internet, but with panache.)
The XAND revolution begins with you, dear reader. Use it in emails. Slip it into presentations. Scrawl it on legal documents. When people ask what it means, look at them with barely concealed pity and say, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand’.
Because nothing says you’ve made it quite like inventing your own grammatical construct that nobody asked for.
XAND that’s the tea. β
Geoffrey Pemberton-Smythe (AKA Bry Willis AKA Ridley Park AKA that guy) writes from his mother’s guest cottage in Upper Wibbling-on-the-Marsh, where he is currently labouring over his magnum opus: ‘A Taxonomy of Semicolon Abuses in Modern Discourse (With Particular Attention to American Corporate Memoranda)’. He is not fun at parties XAND proud of it.
Philosophics 