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From: TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Use of "and"
Message-ID: <12593@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 20-Apr-84 23:06:52 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12593
Posted: Fri Apr 20 23:06:52 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Apr-84 05:42:40 EST
Lines: 12

From:  Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>

Come on, folks.   When someone says "my brothers and sisters" they do not mean
the intersection of the two sets.   Aside from its legal meaning of "or" which
I mentioned earlier, the English word "and" has at least two more meanings:
logical conjunction, and straight addition (which means union when applied to
sets).   Though I'm willing to be contradicted, I believe that English usage
prefers to intersect predicates rather than sets.   Namely, "tall and fat
people" can mean people who are both tall and fat (intersection), but "tall
people and fat people" means both the set of people who are tall and the set of
people who are fat (union).
                                        - Richard