What's wrong with constructions like "Dragons are big, green, and eat people."?

Question

Many writers on English usage warn against uses of "and" and other conjunctions such as the following:

• (a) Dragons are big, green, and eat people.
• (b) The group has interests in Germany, Australia, Japan, and intends to expand into North America next year.
• (c) He plays good cricket, likes golf and a rubber of whist.
• (d) Don't be lazy, cowardly, or take shortcuts.

What's the problem, and how can it be avoided?

(Note that this is a separate issue from the question of whether to include a serial comma or Oxford comma, i.e., a comma before the last item of a list. This issue occurs with or without a serial comma.)

Answer 1

This pattern is called a series out of control (Bryson, 2004, p. 13) or bastard enumeration (Fowler, 1926, p. 22). It belongs to the broader class of failures of parallel structure such as "Mary likes hiking, swimming, and to ride a bicycle.", where the first two items of the list are gerunds but the last is an infinitive (Purdue OWL, 2018). In a series out of control, the parallelism failure is such that literal extrapolation of the list into independent phrases makes one or more of the phrases nonsensical or ungrammatical.

Consider, for example, "Dragons are big, green, and eat people.". We can view this sentence as a compressed form of three sentences:

• Dragons are big.
• Dragons are green.
• Dragons are eat people.

Oops, that last one doesn't quite make sense. The writer meant for the "are" to only apply to "big" and "green", but the syntax connects "are" to "eat people", too. There are lots of ways you could correct this problem. Here are several versions that pass the above test of expansion into separate sentences:

1. Dragons are big and green and eat people.
2. Dragons are big and green, and they eat people.
3. Dragons are big and green. Dragons eat people.
4. Dragons are big, are green, and eat people.

(1) is okay but could be a little hard to read. (2) and (3) are more comprehensible. In (2), the comma helps, but it isn't required. (4) is somewhat awkward and would be discouraged by many authorities. This more unusual kind of split, a less blatant kind of faulty parallelism, is attention-getting and most useful for rhetorical or humorous effect, as in "She made no reply, up her mind, and a dash for the door.", from the Flanders and Swann song "Have Some Madeira M'Dear".

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Bryson, B. (2004). Bryson's dictionary of troublesome words. New York: Broadway Books. Retrieved from https://penguinrandomhousesecondaryeducation.com/book/?isbn=9780767910439

Fowler, H. W. (1926) A dictionary of modern English usage (1st ed.). Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.15684

Purdue OWL. (2018). "Parallel Structure // Purdue Writing Lab". Retrieved from http://web.archive.org/web/20181119195059/https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/mechanics/parallel_structure.html

Answer 2

The break-down in parallelism can perhaps be more clearly seen if bullet points are used as follows:

                                     • big

(a) Dragons are:       • green

                                    • eat people

........

                  • plays good cricket

(c) He:     • likes golf

                  • a rubber of whist

Answer 3

These can all be avoided by more or less the same method:

• (a) Dragons are big, green, and eat people.

Dragons are big and green, and they eat people.

• (b) The group has interests in Germany, Australia, Japan, and intends to expand into North America next year.

The group has interests in Germany, Australia, and Japan, and intends to expand into North America next year.

• (c) He plays good cricket, likes golf and a rubber of whist.

He plays good cricket, and likes golf and a rubber of whist.

• (d) Don't be lazy, cowardly, or take shortcuts.

Don't be lazy or cowardly, or take shortcuts.

This is how I would write them, being as I am an incurable pedant. But your original sentences would be fine in spoken English.

Answer 4

Typically the last coordinate in a coordination is marked (introduced by a coordinator such as and or or).

What creates the issue in all these examples is that there are two coordiantions, the larger coordination being syndetic (marked), and the smaller coordination asyndetic (unmarked). Thus, at first glance it appears to be a single faulty coordination, when in fact there are two coordinations each of which would be just fine on its own - the issue is their combination. Note that all of the below would be just fine were we to eliminate all but the first item in the asyndetic coordination.

a Dragons

[are [big, green]],

[and eat people].

b The group

[has interests in [Germany, Australia, Japan]],

[and intends to expand into North America next year].

c He

[plays good cricket],

[likes [golf and a rubber of whist]].

d Don't

[be [lazy, cowardly]],

[or take shortcuts].

Asyndetic coordination being generally rare, one isn't on the lookout for it and gets fooled by the appearance of a single syndetic coordination.

This can be avoided by not placing an asyndetic coordination inside a larger syndetic one, especially when the last item in the apparent list is the one marked.

Answer 5

First of all. The 'rule' you are referring to is a prescriptive rule. These are frowned upon in scientific study of language: language is as it is used. Italian is the language spoken by Italians, not a 'bad, bad' Latin. So my advice to you would be to disregard any rules of this type.

But to actually address the issue, the problem is with what the conjunction conjoins. (I am primarily looking at this from my knowledge of general linguistics, formal syntax and formal semantics). 'Dragons are green and eat people" is not a problem because the conjunction conjoins 'are green' and 'eat people'. If you do formal semantics, you will notice that 'and' is very ambiguous. What does 'and' actually mean (or do). There is one 'and' (the and of logic) that conjoins propositions ('The dragon is green AND the dragon eats people') another the creates entities of of entities (The entity "my parents" which consist of "my mother and my father"). And then there are all kinds of other 'and's. Is the 'and' in "my mother and father" a different 'and' than the above? Possibly, but you can also see it as the same and, and the phrase being elliptical: "my mother" + "... father", where something ('my') is obviously missing and is 'filled in'. So my take on this is that all the 'and's ARE actually actually the same, but underspecified: their specific meaning (what is this conjoining), is 'filled in' from the context it occurs in and if the conjoined terms do not fit, they are coerced into a term that fits, by filling out the ellipsis.

This is how language works. And it springs from 'Dragons are big and green' being ambiguous between 'Dragons are big and dragons are green' and 'Dragons are (big and green)'. But this is a structural ambiguity and not a semantic ambiguity.

There are other ambiguities in 'and', e.g. does 'Peter and John can lift the piano' mean that they can lift it together or that each of them can do it. So semantically 'and' is also ambiguous, even if it is not actually written out in the sentence: "Two people can lift the piano" (which also has the de re vs de dicto ambiguity: is this two specific people or two random people).

Answer 6

I wonder if the constructions quoted could be classed as a variant on one or more of the classical rhetorical tropes/schemes such as ellipsis, or even (at more of a stretch) zeugma / syllepsis.

After all, though those quoted constructs are strictly grammatically incorrect, they are not ambiguous, are easy to comprehend, and in several cases easier on the ear than the more correct versions.