{"id":17953,"date":"2019-06-20T09:45:03","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T16:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17953"},"modified":"2019-06-18T10:47:09","modified_gmt":"2019-06-18T17:47:09","slug":"does-both-mean-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2019\/06\/20\/does-both-mean-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Does both mean two?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Nonscientific survey here.<\/p>\r\n<p>Question 1: In your own personal usage, can you use the word <i>both<\/i> with more than two items?<\/p>\r\n<p>For example, do the following sound okay to you?<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Wash both the plate, the bowl, and the cup.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Wash both of the three dishes.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Question 2: What about the word <i>either<\/i>? For example:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Wash either the plate, the bowl, or the cup.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Wash either of the three dishes.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Question 3: What about <i>neither<\/i>\/<i>nor<\/i>? For example:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Wash neither the plate, the bowl, nor the cup.<\/li>\r\n  <li>Wash neither of the three dishes.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>Question 4: What about <i>whether<\/i>? For example:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Whether you open the door, close the door, or leave it alone, don\u2019t go through it.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>In my usage, all of those words apply only to exactly two items (though <i>whether<\/i> is a bit more flexible for me than the others), but recently I\u2019ve seen several cases of more-than-two usage, so I\u2019m curious about what other people think.<\/p>\r\n<p>Various online sources suggest that the more-than-two usage is generally considered nonstandard but has been used by plenty of writers, especially in informal contexts. But even so, I\u2019d be interested to hear about your usage.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-usage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17953"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17953\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17961,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17953\/revisions\/17961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}