On the decline and fall of the classical vampire

[unixronin]

There is no reason to get upset because you get to live forever while not being hunted to death by righteous men, having to avoid delicious garlic¹, while also having every girl or boy in a mile radius fall madly in love with you.  That is not the curse of the ages.  That is awesome.

[1]  I assume the author meant "not having to avoid..." here.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It helps if you rephrase it as:

"while neither being hunted to death by righteous men, nor having to avoid delicious garlic."

Now that's more the phrasing I expected to find there. I've seen the 'not a, b or c' usage all over the place of course, and the 'neither a nor b, but c' usage, but the 'not a, b and c' usage where c is apparently intended neither to be negated nor grouped with a and/or b is just ... grammatically bizarre. When I see the 'not a, b and c' usage I parse it as 'b and c, rather than a'.

Garlic || !Garlic

[ewen]

The sentence construction is odd, I think because they ran two logical sentences together without really thinking about conjunctions required.

As written I'd interpret it as ((NOT (A OR B)) AND C). But that's largely because "while" is repeated against C, but it's not repeated against "B", so the negation ("while not") carries from A to B, but is removed for C. The lack of both "or" and "and" in the sentence (the individual parts are simply abutted together, with "while" being forced to serve as the conjunction) makes interpretation tricky. But legal drafters have managed far worse.

The "neither/nor, and" combination would be much more readable. I'd recommend they find a copy-editor familiar with grammar :-)

Ewen