My vote's mainly with carrie and Pigpen. Here we have a construction meant to set one thing against another, "Either A or B" (but presumably not both). I would consider the separation of the phrases to be the most effective and emphatic construction.

Yael's construction reminds me of something you'd read in Sabatini... "The cavalier sheathed his rapier slowly, raising an eyebrow as he muttered, 'Well, sir, then one of us is a fool." LOL

MS: No need to be redundant ;)

Teresa is always right :)

Yeah, you're right. Sounds better that way. "Let's you and I be friends" is a childhood memory.

In the case of the Game Boy, I have to put in my two cents worth.... Products are frequently named by sticking a cool-sounding word on them without any regard for rhyme, reason, or the long-suffering nerves of language vigilantes such as ourselves. :)

In other words, ignore it. They could have just as easily named it the Game Boy "Cool" or the Game Boy "Rush."

What really chaps my ass is the names car manufacturers use. Especially Toyota. What, in the name of all that's holy, is a "Camry?"

'80s is correct. You don't write 80's because the 's is not an acceptable way to form the plural. You're abbreviating "eighties," not "eighty's."

hey Tensor! a fan says hello...

You CAN say, "there isn't any such thing."

My father, a native Hungarian speaker, used to say "no such a thing" until I was about 3 or 4. I used to work for a fellow from Bombay (pardon me, Mumbai) who used this sort of article-adding construction when he wasn't really thinking about his diction. I don't know about the languages Mr. Kale spoke originally, though I know he spoke both the national and regional languages, but I do know that Hungarian doesn't use articles in the same way English does, when Hungarian uses them at all.

Dyske, my guess is that writers who "come from" other languages that do not use articles would make this mistake. I would bet anything that your "professional writers" are engineers of some sort. The engineers I work with all play fast and loose with any language they happen to be speaking at the moment... I've been in the room when Spanish, Norwegian, standard American English, and (believe it or not) Geordie were all flying around. Crazy oilngas biz. :)

Yeah, I saw that website too, Z.

AFTER I tried my best to guess.

I gave up proofreading when I stopped getting paid for it... lol.

In the first paragraph above (it SHOULD be above, but the posts show in REVERSE chronological order... this is a hassle), it should be "the en dash, and the em dash." Calling them N dash and M dash is not, strictly speaking, wrong, but it's best to be consistent.

There are three types of "line thingies" you can use for various purposes; they are the hyphen, the en dash, and the M dash. Visually, the difference is that a hyphen is short (long enough that it isn't confused with a period or comma), the en dash is longer (by convention, the width of the capital N), and the em dash is the longest (the width of the capital M). A brief example of the most important types of uses for each follows.

I was taught that a hyphen was used in text for hyphenated words or to indicate a syllable break at the end of a line. It can also be used as a "minus" sign in mathematical equations. In American phone numbers, it's always used between the last and next-to-last part, and often between the area code and local part. It can also be used when you are using a phrase as an adjective (as in "next-to-last" above). If you are an Orthodox Jew, you use one in place of the O in "G-d." The proofreaders' mark for a hyphen is a = sign.

To type an en dash, you must substitute a hyphen (usually without spaces around it), or else use a special code to insert one in your word processing program. It's used to indicate a range, such as A-Z or 5000-6000. It can also be used in the very rare case of a hyphenated compound made from hyphenated words. The proofreaders' mark is like a fraction with a "1" over an "n".

An em dash is best typed as two hyphens--you might sometimes also see a hyphen with spaces around it. It's used in some of the same ways as a semicolon--to show pauses and set off parenthetical comments--but it has many of the same problems as a semi, too, as you can easily create huge run-on sentences if you're not careful. It's sometimes used if you don't want to use swear words or full names of people, like so: "Ms. S-- hit her thumb with the hammer and said 'D-- it!'" The proofreaders' mark for the em dash is like a fraction with "1" over "m".