Both as a copyeditor and as a reader, I often see between used with or instead of and in describing a choice between two alternatives. It’s as though the simple “or” setup had collided with the correct “between … and” structure, and someone got chocolate in someone else’s peanut butter.
Note that between is implicated in multiple issues other than this one. If you’re concerned about between versus among, for example, consult a dictionary. The phrase “between you and me” will be the subject of a (likely overlong) future post, so hold your horses on that one. And the parallelism snafus into which between can lure even the most careful writer are a rich topic on their own, so we’ll leave those for a future post as well.
Here’s an example1 of the problem I’m specifically interested in right now:
(Unfortunately, in order to write about a writing error, I have to repeat the error. And besides the fact that it makes my teeth itch, repeating a wrong construction can eventually make that construction start sounding right to the mind’s ear. And I don’t want that! So whenever I have to repeat an error, I promise to leave you with an example of that same issue handled correctly. That antidote is coming up.)
The conjunction or is certainly the simplest and most familiar way to indicate an alternative: Paper or plastic?
But the result of an or operation is singular. When the preposition between is used to set up a choice, what it introduces (the object of the preposition) has to be two things, a pair of alternatives. The choice might be between art and commerce, sweet and salty, good and evil. (The “tw” in “between” comes from Old English twā, meaning two.)
A copyeditor on the clock who encounters this “between … or” problem would simply replace the or with an and and move on. But off the clock, she might wonder why that or crept in there in the first place.
Maybe the writer doesn’t trust the word between to do its job. The or might be intended to prop up or bolster the choice-ness of between. But if the writer doesn’t trust words to mean what they say, the reader won’t either.
Or maybe the writer thinks the reader won’t be able to keep the between part of the construction in mind all the way to the pair of alternatives that’s coming up. The or hammers on the idea of choice, just in case the reader wasn’t paying attention.
But there’s no need for all that hammering racket. If you use between correctly to point toward an upcoming choice, the reader will learn to expect the and options waiting around the bend.
Is it possible that this awkward dancing around the structure of a choice has something to do with our human nervousness about decisions in general?
As Oliver Burkeman reminds us in his book Four Thousand Weeks, the word decide comes straight from Latin decidere, which “means ‘to cut off,’ as in slicing away alternatives; it's a close cousin of words like ‘homicide’ and ‘suicide.’”
Because we humans are limited by mortality, says Burkeman,
a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever. … Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
Now for that correct example I promised. This is the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith:
Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.2
And here’s an extra one:
Pausing for a water break before beginning his descent, Menke ran his hand over another boulder and broke off a piece of crusty rock tripe, or lichen. “Very low nutritional value,” he said. “But if faced with a choice between eating rock tripe and dying, you eat rock tripe.”3
Gabriele Gava and Robert Stern, eds., Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2015), 106.
John Kenneth Galbraith, “How Keynes Came to America,” in Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971), quoted in Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations.
Ben McGrath, “Shake It Off,” New Yorker, November 28, 2022.