Between each

18 Comments

Here's a grammatical construct I see fairly often in submitted stories:

* There was a gap between each of the books.

* A divider separated each shoe.

* Put a blank line between each paragraph.

I view these as mistakes. Using this sort of construct is an easy mistake to make: I often find myself wanting to say that last one, for example. But each refers to each individual item as a single thing, while between and similar words should (imo) be used to talk about two or more adjacent things.

So I advise rewriting in various ways:

There were gaps between the books.

There was a gap between each pair of books.

There was a gap between each book and the next.

A divider separated each shoe from its neighbor.

Put a blank line after each paragraph.

Use blank lines to separate paragraphs.

Use blank lines between paragraphs.

And so on.

18 Responses to “Between each”

  1. Shmuel

    Hmm. I’m going to have to ponder this one. I follow the logic, and can’t argue with it… but I can’t help but feel that the “mistaken” examples are unambiguously understandable, and read better than most of the rewritten versions. I’m wondering whether one might be able to legitimately claim that the missing parts of the first versions are implied. It’s food for thought, at any rate.

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  2. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    Now you’re just being persnickety, Jedediah.

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  3. David Moles

    A divider separated each shoe… into two half-shoes, which might have made for interesting art in a Dada sort of way, but which were completely useless as footwear.

    Or consider twenty books. A gap between each book and the next: 19 gaps, reasonable. A gap between each book: 20 gaps, geometrically impossible.

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  4. Shmuel

    Ah, but what if the books were arranged in a circle?

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  5. Jay Lake

    Jed Hartman, prescriptivist grammarian-at-law

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  6. Jed

    I asked about this over dinner; we even ended up phoning a high school English teacher (which phone call unfortunately only confused matters more, oh well). I think the general feeling among those at the table was that the “between each” construction was technically incorrect, but that most of those present wouldn’t notice it or think it wrong if they saw or heard it used. Sounds like some of y’all feel similarly, while others don’t see it as even technically wrong.

    I think some of y’all may’ve thought that I was just overapplying prescriptivist rules of grammar here, reciting rules for the sake of rules, so I should note that this construction honestly sounds wrong to me. To me, “There was a gap between each book” (a more concise rendering than the version I put in the entry) sounds just as weird as “There was a gap between the book.”

    But this wouldn’t be the first time that my intuition about what sounds grammatical doesn’t match popular usage. For example, my co-author on a computer book some years back once used the construction “both A as well as B”; to me, that sounds extremely redundant, and combines two incompatible constructions (“both A and B” and “A as well as B”), but my co-author (an educated and experienced writer with whom I usually agreed about almost everything) said it sounded completely natural.

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  7. Nao

    Sounds wrong to me, too.

    With “there was a gap between each book” I know what’s meant, but it takes me longer to get to the meaning than it would if it were phrased as “There were gaps between all the books”.

    (Just as I know what’s meant when people who use certain dialects say “I have to wear bifocals anymore”, but it sounds wrong to me. It’s less jarring than it used to be, since it’s part of my husband’s dialect, but for me, “anymore” has to have a “not” or “never” or other negative in the sentence with it, as in “I can’t stay up late anymore.”)

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  8. Jay Lake

    Well, see, you’re trespassing on the territory and language of style. I do lots of things in my prose that I *know* would get me a red frownie face in any self-respecting English teacher’s class, but they work for the story. Grammatical rules exist for a reason, but in well-executed fiction they’re more like guidelines.

    Besides so much of formal English grammar is Latin shoehorned into textbooks against all observational evidence in the interests of a seventeenth-century notion of cultural legitimacy, fostered since by generations of English teachers under the same theory as fraternity hazing — “if I had to suffer through this crap, you should too.”

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  9. David Moles

    That’s as may be, but when I read between each, it doesn’t work for the story, it works against it. It says to me, this author is too lazy to figure out an elegant way to describe this scene, and maybe too lazy to even figure out in his or her head what the scene really looks like.

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  10. Jed

    I agree that grammar is secondary to narrative voice and style. But the point of my last comment was that to me, this isn’t a “some people use this phrasing, others use this other phrasing, I happen to prefer one over the other but your style may vary” issue; it’s a correct/incorrect grammar issue.

    The silly Latin-imposed-on-English rules are in a different category: splitting infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions are totally fine as far as I’m concerned. (You’ll get a few grammarians who will think you’re uneducated for doing that, but not many these days.) But I suspect that those of you arguing that style trumps everything will agree that there are some constructions that are, to any native speaker’s ear, ungrammatical. (Example: the sentence “Bookcase transitive pink.” I imagine you can come up with a context in which someone might say that and it might make some contorted kind of sense, but it’s not a sentence that conforms to most people’s ideas of grammaticality.) If you have a good reason for using such a construction in fiction or poetry, then of course you should use it; that’s fine. But if you use such a construction casually, in a context where readers are expecting a more standard construction, it will look like a mistake. To put it another way: Jay, in any of your relatively normal narrative voices, would you write “There was a gap between the book”? Or does that sound wrong to you? (Again, I’m certain that you can come up with some context or voice in which it would be fine. I’m talking about normal everyday speech or writing.)

    Clearly this “between each” thing isn’t in the category of “obvious grammatical mistake” for some of you; the point of my previous comment was to make clear that it is for me, that I’m not just applying rules for their own sake here. There are a wide range of voices that sound fine to me; for example, the use of “anymore” that Nao mentioned isn’t part of my own dialect, but I wouldn’t blink at it in fiction (except in very formal prose). There’s a vast range of grammatical territory that I agree is entirely subject to personal style. For me, the “between each” construction is not in that range.

    But now that I see that is in that range for some of you, I’ll be less draconian about it when editing.

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  11. Jay Lake

    > There was a gap between the book”?
    > Or does that sound wrong to you?
    > (Again, I’m certain that you can come up
    > with some context or voice in which it would
    > be fine. I’m talking about normal everyday
    > speech or writing.)

    No, that wouldn’t sound right to me in everyday speech. As others have noticed, “between the book” and “between each book” are not semantically equivalent, at least to me. “Each” implies a number of objects greater than one, which can have gaps between them without any pretzel logic or contortions of style.

    > “Bookcase transitive pink.”

    Yeah, that’s a good one. I mean, sure, we could force it work. I can think of one easy way off the top of my head. But it would definitely be forced, unlike the “gap between each book” example, which sounds natural to me.

    All of which makes the interesting if somewhat obvious point that there are some rules which are deeper than others, in terms of how readily violable they are to us writers. At a simplistic level, it has something to do with the basic function of sentence structure and parts of speech — the “transitive pink” example doesn’t even generate a properly structured nonesense sentence, while “gap between each” is a higher-level usage issue. (And yes, I know parts of speech are much more slippery and unclear than my high school English teachers would have me go through life believing.)

    This is the stuff that makes writing fun.

    Yours in transitive pink,

    Jay

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  12. Dan

    When I read your examples of incorrect usage, the problem seemed clear. At the same time, though, I heard them in my head as implying a longer, correct phrase:

    • There was a gap between each of the books and the next.

    • A divider separated each shoe from the shoe on either side.

    • Put a blank line between each paragraph and the following one.

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  13. David Bellamy

    Come on, you guys…

    There was a gap between each pair of adjacent books.

    Simple, precise, unambiguous. But then, I am a mathematician.

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  14. Shmuel

    There was a gap between each pair of adjacent books.

    Maybe it’s just me, but I’d take this as meaning that you’ve got pairs of books on the shelves, with gaps separating each pair from the next. That is, two volumes, gap, two volumes, gap, and so on.

    (Granted, based on the original post, Jed wouldn’t have this problem, as it exists only for those of us who’d understand “a gap between each” as meaning that there were gaps between each book and its neighbors.)

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  15. Lewis Carroll

    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

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  16. David B

    Shmuel, I do not understand how your interpretation is possible. It would have to say ‘between each pair and the next/previous pair, or something of the sort. The thing is, ‘between’ requires a dual object. ‘Pair’ is such a dual object. Otherwise, you need two nouns or pronouns separated by ‘and.’ Between, followed by a singular which cannot be interpreted as two of anything, is never correct. (I am beginning to understand, come to think of it, why Old English had a singular, a dual, and a plural, instead of merely a singualar and a plural.)

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  17. Arthur Evans

    I agree with Shmuel–I think “between each pair” is actually worse than “between each book,” because it’s less clear. It probably would be clear if the phrase “between each whatever” wasn’t in wide usage, but it is.

    If “between each book” means “between each book and the next book,” then clearly “between each pair of adjacent books” means, “between each pair of books and the next pair of books.” Or does it?
    By adding the word “pair,” you’ve just introduced a bit of uncertainty that wasn’t in the original phrase. Is it book, gap, book, gap, or book, book, gap, book, book?

    In “between a pair of books,” there’s no ambiguity, but throw in that “each,” and boy howdy you got trouble.

    “Each pair” is actually kind of a tricky concept.
    If I say, “put each pair of books in its own box,” it’s clear that 20 books yields 10 pairs. But if we interpret Mr. Bellamy’s sentence as he proposes, we have 19 pairs of books! Simple, precise, and unambiguous? Such is the effect of that slithery serpent “each” on a straightforward sentence. (Or perhaps my problem here is that “pair” connotes a persistent union: the marriage bond, the life-long mating of swans; where David’s sentence converts it into a dasiy chain of overlapping pairs, each book pairing with the next, a veritable orgy. But I digress.)

    When Jed first brought this up at the aforementioned dinner party, my first reaction was, “of course it’s wrong.” Where’s the gap? Between each book and what? The next book? The shelf? Are we talking antigravity books here?

    Like Jed, I just thought it sounded wrong. On the way home, I tried to think of other ways of phrasing the sentence and discovered it was harder than it seemed. So, I have some sympathy for the each-bookers.

    I think the problem is that the simple, unambiguous fact we’re all talking about, a well-spaced set of books, is rather difficult to describe precisely without sounding awkward or stilted. As Shmuel and Dan have suggested, I think “between each book” can be considered as an idiomatic shorthand for “between each book and the next,” or something of that nature. A few google searches assured me that the “between each …” is in wide use.

    And still, I don’t much like it. I’m all for freeing authors from the abstract tyranny of grammar–but only if they do something interesting with it. This phrase just lies there on the page.

    To heck with rephrasing it with, “there was a gap between each book and the next.” How about, “the books were lined up like Britons at a bus stop”? Or, “he didn’t have many books, but he tried to compensate by spacing them out to fill the shelf”? “The books were lined up with obsessive precision, no two touching.” How about “the bookshelf was half-empty”?

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  18. David B

    The only problem with “Between each and the next” is that when you get to the last, there is no next.

    “Between each…” is not in wide usage in the circles in which I live and move. It sounds/reads as though the person speaking/writing does not have a clue.

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