Why FANBOYS is nothing but a facile lie
To the best of my knowledge, there are seven coordinating conjunctions....
I’m afraid that your question is based on a false premise. That’s because
English does not have seven coordinating conjunctions. This is just a fairytale you were told once. It is not true.
This silliness started because those august guardians of normative written English, the underpaid but well-meaning teachers of English
composition, came up with what I’m sure they hoped would be a cute little ditty to serve as a prescriptive mnemonic to try to get their
students to mechanically place commas in certain places in written sentences. No thinking required. Nor honesty, either.
As you have yourself noticed, which I imagine is what motivated your question in the first place, this would-be “rule” simply does not pan out. Notice how the quotation from Geoffery Pullum at the bottom of this answer’s References section observes:
A lot of style and grammar guide authors must
look at a list of desiderata such as (1) simple, (2)
memorizable, and (3) accurate, and think to themselves,
two out of three isn't bad.
In this case, two of three certainly is bad:
- ✅ Sure it’s simple.
- ✅ Sure it’s memorizable.
- ❌ But it is also so inaccurate as to be misleading and wrong.
So now we have an entire generation, maybe even two, who have had this incorrect mnemonic drummed into them. Let me repeat: English does not have seven coordinating conjunctions, and the words these composition teachers were all so bothered by do not form such a category in English.
This whole and wholly silly myth is magisterially trounced by Brett Reynolds in
his 2006 paper “The Myth of FANBOYS: Coordination, Commas, and College
Composition Classes”, whose abstract reads:
The claim that the words for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so (FANBOYS) constitute a complete list of English coordinating conjunctions is examined though syntactic analysis and found wanting. This analysis is presented as an illustration of the need for teachers constantly to question the choice of material that we present to our students and our reasons for presenting it.
I encourage you to read through the entire paper.
Further References with Selected Citations
Ben Zimmer
Ben Zimmer writes in his 2010-05-19 posting to Visual Thesaurus:
Though and, but, or, and nor do indeed form a class of
conjunctions joining items of equal syntactic importance, for,
yet, and so do not work quite the same way. And even the
practical advice of placing a comma before one of the FANBOYS
conjunctions doesn't hold in all cases.
Karl Hagen
Karl Hagen writes in his “Comma fanboys” posting to his
Polysyllabic blog posting, which he filed under Education,
Prescriptivism:
The larger question behind the origin of FANBOYS is why these
particular words made it into a list. And, but, or, and nor are
(if we ignore some niggling exceptions) clear coordinators, but
for, yet, and so have significant differences from the pure
coordinators.
It would be interesting to trace the development, in schoolbook
grammars, of how the set of coordinating conjunctions is
defined over time. A cursory reading of several books that
precede the fanboys formulation shows that there is a lot of
variation, and that there only thing that really seems to
recommend fanboys is that it is catchy rather than accurate.
That, however, is a story for another post.
Brett Reynolds
Brett Reynolds writes in his inaugural 2006-07-28 blog post on
“The Myth of Fanboys”:
Two recent threads on Language Log, word classes and style
guides, brought to mind one thing that baffled me when I began
college teaching: FANBOYS. The first time I walked into our
writing centre, I noticed that FANBOYS was pasted in large
letters across one wall. While many readers may be familiar
with FANBOYS, I'd never heard of them, but according to many
freshman writing textbooks, FANBOYS is a mnemonic for the co-ordinating
conjunctions in English (for, and, nor, but, or,
yet, & so). Many style guides go so far as to state that when
one of the FANBOYS is used to join two independent clauses, it
must be preceded by a comma.
Of course, FANBOYS, as articulated above, is a myth. It is a
myth in the sense that it is a fiction created to deal with a
uncertain world in a simple way. It’s a myth in the sense that
it is a belief that is shared by members of a certain
community and, to a certain extent, identifies that community,
the community being college composition teachers and their
students (insomuch as each individual buys into the myth.)
It’s a myth in the sense that it has taken on great import
among the community of believers. And finally, it’s a myth in
the sense it can serve a gate-keeping function, preserving
power for those who know or “understand” it and denying it to
those who don’t.
As the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explains, only
and, but, and or are prototypical coordinators, while nor is
very close. So and yet share more properties with conjunctive
adverbs (e.g., however), and “for...lack(s) most of the
properties distinguishing prototypical coordinators from
prepositions with clausal complements” (p. 1321). Furthermore,
there are other ways to coordinate independent clauses in
English.
Geoffery Pullum
Geoffery Pullum writes in his 2006-07-29 posting to Language Log:
Brett Reynolds in the inaugural post of his new blog
comments on something that baffled him when he first began
college teaching: FANBOYS. I hadn’t heard of this before
either. FANBOYS is nothing to do with fangirls. Says Brett:
The first time I walked into our writing centre, I noticed
that FANBOYS was pasted in large letters across one wall.
While many readers may be familiar with FANBOYS, I’d never
heard of them, but according to many freshman writing
textbooks, FANBOYS is a mnemonic for the co-ordinating
conjunctions in English (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, & so).
This is supposed to be a list of words that pattern alike.
(Check it out. They do not.) Much of what traditional grammar
says about the purported “co-ordinating conjunctions” is a
mess, like what it says about the pseudo-class of
“conjunctions” generally; The Cambridge Grammar tries to
straighten this out. Brett explains some of the more complex
reality very nicely, and he also understands what makes an
easily memorized oversimplification so seductive: “it gives the
faithful a comfortingly simple handhold in a confusing world.”
It does indeed. A lot of style and grammar guide authors must
look at a list of desiderata such as (1) simple, (2)
memorizable, and (3) accurate, and think to themselves,
two out of three isn’t bad.
