“And” Cannot be substituted with “but?” In what ways?
What should I write for my first sentence that:
Many were the dangers arrayed against me, but I had no fear.
What are the dangers arrayed against me
and I had no fear?
I noticed this whilst speaking with a co-worker, and found he extremely rarely used the conjunction ‘but’, favoring ‘and’ instead. It sounds strange to me, I cannot find anything to say this is grammatically incorrect.
The conjunction but means the same thing as the combination and, in most cases. In this post we have had some of the conversation about the disjunction / is it for anyone who is familiar with the disjunction or?
For that, there are plenty of idioms that use but but for that there is nothing but the best, Why? , and the like, but in normal use the logic is the same.
In non-idiomatic usage, the difference between and and and is that
but carries a presupposition that something else was expected.
- What happened to Mary Mary, who washed the dishes and Martha washed them?
(No presupposition) - Bill washed the dishes, but Mary dried them.
Other words can be used to implicate expectations, like
beside(s), except, or instead of), but they’re not coordinating conjunctions like and, or, and but.
‘And’ and ‘but’ are coordinators? Does “instead” means something. As an adverb, you can’t substitute for other adverbs. Is it really ever easy to identify sentence boundaries in speech?
