Any question containing the word ‘or’, I propose, is a bad question. ‘Is it nature or nurture?’ ‘Should I vote Labour or Conservative?’ Either/or questions everywhere. I blame the intelligentsia. Mostly, though, I blame Socrates. He was the one that made a science out of either/or thinking, encouraging us all – anyone that spent any time in a classroom at least – to bludgeon our way through an argument until one person emerges the victor. In reality, most people – the people stood at the front of the classroom aside, obviously – have learned enough to know that the right answer to these kinds of question is both or neither. Respectively.

Listen out for the word ‘or’ during conversation and it’s amazing to me how widespread it is. Trade-off thinking is everywhere. When you start to point it out to people, at first they don’t know what you’re talking about. Then later, if you badger them long enough, they start removing the ‘or’. So the question then becomes, ‘should we go to Blackpool for our holiday?’ Unfortunately, the shorthand hasn’t taken away the either/or thrust of the question. The word ‘or’ didn’t feature in the actual words, but the way it was meant to be interpreted was still very much, ‘should we go to Blackpool for our holiday or somewhere else?’

This is a much more insidious form of trade-off thinking. Especially if it results in me having to go to Blackpool again. Thinking about it, Blackpool is a very either/or kind of place too. I’ve been there five times in my life, and four times I found myself in a fist-fight. Usually in a pub, and usually coming shortly after the question, ‘are you looking at me?’

Granted, I probably shouldn’t have responded on the most recent occasion, that did he know he’d just used an implied or. ‘Are you looking at me or were you merely scanning your eyes around the room?’. It just goes to show how dangerous either/or thinking can turn out to be.

If you think people use the word ‘or’ too much, just wait til you start listening out for the implied or. Either/or thinking is so endemic we’ve made it invisible.

Every time you hear a closed question, you’re hearing an implied or. Most times you hear a future-tense statement, you’re also hearing an implied or. Every time you hear the word Blackpool… you get the idea.

We built a PanSensic narrative lens to pick up on ‘or’s and implied ors. Just to see how endemic endemic is. The answer turns out to be ‘very’. Especially if you also go listen out for the trade-off solving ‘and’ words and calculate the ratio of ‘or’s to ‘and’s.

I was at a conference last week. A reviewer put in their feedback form at the end of the two days that they thought it had been a very ‘and’ event. I ran all of the papers and narrative content I could find through PanSensic. The ‘or/and’ ratio was a shade over 40. If that makes it an ‘and’ event, I think the best we can say about society as a whole is that we still have a long way to go. Or…