Salt and pepper Rain or shine

As you’ll probably have guessed from the title, we’re going to look at pairs of words that are used together in a fixed order, separated either by ‘and’ or ‘or’. Some of these word pairs are simply two things that we use or experience together, such as ‘knife and fork’ and ‘thunder and lightning’. Others are more idiomatic, their meanings not always obvious, for example bits and pieces (=small things or tasks of different types) and short and sweet (=surprisingly quick). The English language is full of these short phrases and this post aims to give you a useful selection of them. As ever, we focus only on items in current use. Let’s start with the first type – things that logically come together. The ‘which comes first?’ rule for these pairs is generally that the bigger or more important of the two items comes first, (though it’s not always possible to say which this is): bread and butter; tables and chairs; shirt and tie; cup and saucer; name and address; hot and cold; rich and famous; win or lose. Now let’s focus on a set of frequently used adjective pairs, most of which are at least partly idiomatic. In […]