| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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Page 10
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| newspaper will show you that beginning with but has become common practice, and initial but must be considered acceptable at all levels of style. | 1 |
| but not followed by a comma
| | But is generally not followed by a comma. Correct written style requires Kim wanted to go, but we stayed, not Kim wanted to go, but, we stayed. | 2 |
| but however
| | For a discussion of this word combination, see
redundancy under Style. | 3 |
| More at
and, cannot, however and pronouns, personal. | 4 |
can
| | can and
may
| | Can I go to the bathroom? Nearly every child has asked this question only to be corrected with You mean, May I go to the bathroom? Generations of teachers have insisted that can should be used only to express the capacity to do something and that may must be used to express permission. But let’s face it, children don’t use can to ask permission out of a desire to be stubbornly perverse. They have learned it as an idiomatic expression from adults: If you finish your spaghetti, you can have dessert. After you clean your room, you can go outside and play. In these and similar spoken uses, can is perfectly acceptable. This is especially true for negative questions such as Can’t I have the car tonight? probably because using mayn’t instead of can’t sounds unnatural. Nevertheless, in more formal usage the distinction between can and may still has many adherents. Only 21 percent of the Usage Panel accepts can instead of may in the sentence Can I take another week to submit the application? May is common in official announcements: Students may pick up the application forms tomorrow. The increased formality of may sometimes highlights the role of the speaker in giving permission. You may leave the room when you’re finished implies that permission is given by the speaker. You can leave the room when you’re finished implies that permission is part of a rule or policy rather than a decision on the part of the speaker. | 5 |
| can showing possibility
| | Like may, can can also be used to indicate what is possible: It may rain this afternoon. Bone spurs can be very painful. In this use, both can and may often have personal subjects: You may be right. You may see him at the concert. From the mountaintop you can see the ocean on a clear day. Even an experienced driver can get lost in this town. | 6 |
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auxiliary and primary verbs and
may. | 7 |
cannot
| | cannot but
| | “I cannot but be gratified by the assurance,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote. He might have said I can but be gratified by the assurance and meant the same thing! How is this possible? The but of cannot but indicates an exception, as it does in sentences such as No one but Jefferson could have written such a document. But the but of can but means “only,” as it does in the sentence We had but a single bullet left. So the two phrases cannot but and can but mean essentially the same thing: “cannot do otherwise than.” Both cannot but and can but are standard expressions that have been in use for hundreds of years. | 8 |
| cannot help
| | The construction cannot help is used with a present participle to roughly the same effect as cannot but in a sentence such as We cannot help ad | 9 |
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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