/

It's ignored as far as I can see by Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots and Leaves  - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It has no place in The Economist's Style Guide - The best-selling guide to English usage, and I recall no mention of it in English lessons at school.

 

I'm talking about the oblique/slash. And yet it seems to be coming more and more popular: "Delete one of the following - 'male/female'."  "Do you smoke?'Yes/No'. " Or simply: 'S/he'. One wonders whether the reticence of grammarians and other pedants to deal with this gripping topic is simply due to the vagueness of nomenclature - oblique/slash/forward slash/virgule, etc. Or is it simply that schoolboys might titter at the rudeness of one of these, and so sensitive teachers move swiftly on to less controversial subjects like the French Revolution or what caused the banking crisis.

 

So what does an oblique mean and when can/should it be used? One might conclude from the above examples that '/'  is simply a lazy way of writing 'or' - particularly when the choices are mutually exclusive. How about when the choices are clearly not mutually exclusive, such as "Grand-parents/parents may come with their children to the school open day" or "Help yourself to knives/forks/spoons from the sideboard" (as is now the case in Brown's in the Covered Market now that the waiters have got so idle, although I still pop in for the 'All-day Breakfast' from time to time)? So perhaps it would be incorrect to limit the oblique to the mutually exclusive. It would seem as if one could replace the oblique with either 'or' or 'and' in these examples, with the 'or' being of the non-exclusive variety.

 

Perhaps therefore the oblique has developed into a neat way of writing 'or' (exclusive or inclusive) or 'and', particularly if you're not quite sure yourself. In other words it's deliberately vague. How about 'and/or'? This is an expression much loved by legal draftspersons, the reason apparently being to try to indicate the inclusive 'or': "Would you like sugar and/or milk?" would seem to mean that you can have sugar, milk or both. But surely lawyers (those most popular and useful members of society) who use 'and/or' to try to achieve unambiguity as above fall into the same trap:  if '/' itself can mean 'or' or 'and' then the 'and' and the 'or' of 'and/or' are superfluous/misleading. Confusing/wrong? Answers by 15/4/14 please.

 

Recommended further reading: the last word on this subject is of course the Danish work "Either/or" by the philosopher Kierkegaard. Good/luck!