Hi,
Could someone please tell me the meaning of slash ‘/’ for above sentence?
Regards,
William
Mainly ‘or’.
and/or
Those two days are best out of all the days,
In lighter vein. What does this slash mean then - ‘and’ and ‘or’ or ‘or’?
It means ‘and’.
It means:
either ‘and’ or ‘or’
(it can be both ‘and’ and ‘or’).
It means ‘and’; forget the ‘or’ nonsense! Thhe fact that you can choose one of the days has nothing to do with the meaning!
Although it is more likely to mean ‘and’ in this case, that is only because of the structure of the rest of the sentence, in comparison with:
The best day is Saturday/Sunday. (more likely to mean ‘or’)
or
The best days are Saturdays/Sundays. (equally likely to be ‘and’ or ‘or’)
However, without additional context you cannot dismiss the possibility of it meaning ‘or’ in this case in its entirety (not if you thought about it rationally and reasonably anyway).
Relying on the definition of it as ‘a short oblique stroke between two words indicating that the appropriate one may be chosen to complete the sense of the text’ (= you can’t rule out either of the two) and reading the original as it was constructed, my feeling it could mean ‘either of them or both depending on…’
Had the author meant only one of the choices, he’d go for another construction: The best days [of the week] are Saturday and Sunday or: The best day [of the week] is either Saturday or Sunday.
Why should we go for the use of the slash if we wish to convey clearly what we mean? The structure of the original sentence is not readily acceptable unless he means ‘and’ by the slash. In such situations the simple and straight way is to say that ‘The best days are Saturday and Sunday’ or ‘The best days are Saturdays and Sundays’, ‘The best day is Saturday or Sunday’, ‘The best days are Saturdays or Sundays’ etc rather than use the symbol and make it ambiguous. However, generally, the element of ‘or’ is more dominant in the use of slash, I feel.
Agree. I wouldn’t use a construction that could be treated ambiguously.
But we were dealing with the original (without any context) and were trying to guess what was on the author’s mind. As we see, opinions differ.
To me, it seems that he meant ‘Saturday and Sunday’ because of the use of ‘are’, which, incidentally, confirms Canadian’s view.
(By the way, this is my 4000th post!!! And I’m going to complete five years on this forum/website very soon! My very sincere thanks to all those who have listened to me with patience!)