Can "and" ever mean "or"?
The Supreme Court will let us know. The fate of thousands of U.S. prisoners hangs in the balance.
The United States Supreme Court is known for taking up tough language questions. But earlier this month, it began tackling possibly its thorniest grammatical issue yet: Does the word and mean “and”? Or does and mean “or”?
Yes, the court is really arguing over this.
English has just three main coordinating conjunctions — and, or, and but — which join together words or word groups of equal grammatical rank. Yet we need the Supreme Court to distinguish between the two of them.
The trouble dates back to 2018, in what we thought at the time was a shining example of bipartisanship. Remember that bizarre moment when most congressional Republicans, every congressional Democrat, and the neofascist Trump administration came together to pass the First Step Act, the most sweeping criminal justice reform in years? After more than 30 years of Reagan-era mandatory minimum sentences that had seen U.S. prison populations triple, the First Step Act gave judges discretion to apply lighter sentences if defendants met certain criteria, among other reforms. Kim Kardashian was there, lobbying Trump in the Oval Office, while Jared Kushner was wooing Mike Pence, whom the president — Kushner’s father-in-law — hadn’t yet tried to have killed.
It was a weird time.
Turns out it was also too good to be true.
Read the full column at Inquirer.com.