And this is how it starts
Wordle was the game everyone was talking about in 2021 — it spawned countless articles and thousands of imitations and variations. I gave a few of them a go, but it was only really Heardle, in which you have to guess a song after hearing the first few seconds, and Worldle, where you guess the names of countries from their outline, that kept me hooked for more than a few days.
Another contender, although it was a little hit and miss, was Factle, a game that challenges you to pick the top five of something or other. My main issue with Factle was that if you weren’t interested in the topic, then it wasn’t really worth your two minutes.
As I write, Today’s Factle is all about the most followed actors on Instagram. Now, I have to admit, I’m a constant source of cinematic disappointment to family, friends and colleagues alike, so the chances are I’ve never seen your favourite film and I have no idea who was in it. Trying to assess if more people follow Vin Diesel or Jennifer Aniston just doesn’t do it for me.
Last week, however, I did see one Factle that caught my attention: the most-used words in the English Language. This was more like it. Given the grid of options I had to choose from — ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘I’, ‘he’, ‘you’, ‘be’, etc. — I set to work.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t my day. But it did give me a topic to write about for this article, so it wasn’t all bad.
It turns out ‘and’ comes in fifth, according to the Oxford English Corpus rank, which was the source. Of the top five words — ‘the’, ‘be’, ‘to’, ‘of’, and ‘and’ — the word ‘and’ is definitely the most interesting of the bunch, and the one with the most controversy around its use.
So, here are three ways the word ‘and’ and its cousins can stir up squabbles among writers. Before I go into them, I should say now that the views you’re about to read are my own and aren’t endorsed by the other members of the Creative Copy team — some of whom will likely get in touch with me with objections once this article goes live.
And this is a perfectly acceptable way to begin a sentence
It feels like the kind of thing you’re taught not to do from a young age, but as I grow older, the more I see the value in a good ‘and’ to kick off a sentence. I’m also struggling to understand where the rule even comes from, or why it matters. A well-placed ‘and’ at the beginning of a sentence can create an immediacy that hooks you in, and it can also help to break up the rhythm of a paragraph.
The strongest example of an opening ‘and’ that I can think of comes from Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment — a poem he wrote as he was dying from lung cancer.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Here, the power of the opening line, and consequently, the poem itself, is driven by a demanding ‘and’, which calls upon the speaker to assess the life they’ve lived and, hopefully, feel content and serene with their fate. Take the word ‘and’ away, and a lot of the punch of those six short lines disappears along with it.
The cases we touch upon in our work at Wayfair are a bit more prosaic. For example, for TV ads that are more sales-focused, the right use of ‘and’ to tack on extra benefits creates the idea that there are just too many good things about the sale to miss out on. There’s this, this and this — oh, and there’s this as well! What’s not to love?
And now the ampersand
Once enjoying a lofty position as the 27th letter in the alphabet, the ampersand has now been reduced to being thrown lazily into sentences as an abbreviation to save a little time.
There are two big issues with this time-saving strategy, however. For one thing, when writing it out by hand, it requires a very complicated flick of the wrist, disrupting the flow of even the most fluid of writers. Secondly, it doesn’t really save much space either. A saving of two characters isn’t much to write home about. And while we do live in a world where character counts have been diminishing ever since the emergence of SMS, sometimes indulging in full, well-rounded sentences is something you need to go for & embrace. To break the flow of a sentence as I’ve just done, simply doesn’t feel right.
That said, I do think there are some upsides to the ampersand and there is definitely a situation or two where it’s superior to its more character-packed cousin.
The most obvious example is when we write abbreviations, in which case the ampersand is definitely the way to go. Q&As at the end of a late Friday meeting before a little R&R at the weekend are perfectly in order.
And ampersands may help with categorisation too. Consider the following:
Black and White Chairs.
Black & White Chairs.
What do these phrases mean? Do they refer to a set of chairs, some of which are black and some of which are white? Or are they seats directly inspired by the zebra? For me, the ampersand helps to convey the idea that we’re talking about single chairs that are both black and white. The use of the ampersand creates a tighter connection between the two colours. But, maybe this is just me…as I’ve already mentioned, my views are my own.
And Plus + Plus
The plus sign is the one I struggle with the most and it’s also the one that seems to be on the up and up. Perhaps I’m still hanging onto the archaic notion that the plus sign should remain in the realm of arithmetic and differential equations. However, the emergence of services like Disney+ and Apple TV+ in recent years likely herald a new era for the humble plus sign.
When it’s written out as ‘plus’, this is something I still see more as a hallmark of American English than British English, perhaps owing to the two streaming services just mentioned. What is certain, though, is that it’s creeping more and more into everyday lingo. And since a solid rule of thumb in copywriting is to write the way people speak, we should expect to see a lot more of this little symbol. You heard it here first.
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There are so many other controversies about proper etiquette, so that this article could go on forever. Another long-debated issue is the oxford comma, the long-time associate of ‘and’ that sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t appear at the end of lists. Should it be there or not? Well, that’s a five million dollar question for another time.
…oh, and, one more thing. More people follow Vin Diesel. 80.1 million and counting… Poor Jen.
