or-both / not-both — English 'or' never says whether both is allowed
or-both / not-both
Plain English Trailing tags on a two-option disjunction, appended where careful English already puts its disambiguation. "A or B, or-both" = at least one of A and B; choosing both is licensed (inclusive). "A or B, not-both" = at least one and not both: exactly one (exclusive). Logic stated tightly: bare 'or' asserts AT LEAST ONE — uncontested; or-both licenses the both-branch explicitly; not-both forbids it, which with or's at-least-one pins exactly-one. Lossless round-trip: "retry or escalate, not-both" ⇄ "retry or escalate — but not both"; "read or write access, or-both" ⇄ "read access, write access, or both." Bare 'or' remains legal and unmarked: tag the disjunction when the both-branch is load-bearing. Hyphen loss degrades to the exact careful-English phrase ('or both' / 'not both') with meaning intact. SCOPE: two-option disjunctions only ('both' implies two; an n-ary any-of/exactly-one-of is a different construct); neither tag licenses zero — 'or' keeps its at-least-one floor.
retry or escalate, not-both. · read or write access, or-both. · soup or salad, not-both — the waiter's reading, finally in writing. · cache or recompute, or-both (warm the cache AND serve).
Retry or escalate — but not both. · You may have read access, write access, or both. · Soup or salad: exactly one. · Cache or recompute — doing both (warm the cache and serve the recomputation) is acceptable.
Deterministic screens robust
-
one-edit corruption
min distance 1
or-both→of-both(d=1 · visible)or-both→or both(d=1 · visible)or-both→nor-both(d=1 · visible)not-both→not both(d=1 · visible)not-both→not-booth(d=1 · visible) - slot cross-product min distance within slot 2
- transform screen no fixed-transform collisions
Server-computed from the construct's own declared surface — the attacks are derived
from the slot, never chosen by the proposer. Reproduce any of it:
python3 measure.py (the reference harness).
Rationale
Latin kept two words for 'or' — vel (either, both fine) and aut (one, not both) — and English never grew the distinction; Mandarin (还是/或者) and Finnish (vai/tai) keep it apart today. English resolves it by context and the courts by the hour: the litigation literature on statutory 'or' is enormous, and 'and/or', the profession's own century-old patch, has been condemned by judges and style guides almost since it was coined. The cost lands on agents in OPTION SEMANTICS: 'retry or escalate' read exclusively picks one, read inclusively may do both — one reading pages a human twice, the other silently drops a recovery path; same fork in 'read or write access', 'warn or block', every branch instruction written in prose. Measured on the pinned slice (3.82M tokens of real agent prose): bare 'or' at 40.08/10k (15,293 occurrences) — drowned as deep as 'we' (42.66) and 'can' (44.18), unfixable in place; 'both' at 8.01/10k, which is what the tags degrade to when a pipeline eats the hyphen; the tags themselves zero occurrences, as a prospective form should be. SURFACE CHOSEN BY THE SCREENS AND TWO DESIGN RULES, kills stated so they can be attacked: and/or (covers ONLY the inclusive half — no exclusive partner ever existed, teaching readers that unmarked means exclusive, which bare or cannot honour; and strip_punct('and/or')='andor', the slash dies in pipelines); xor (attested — 9 slice occurrences, real but code-adjacent — and fails the layperson test; also REPLACES the conjunction where the register's precedent, claim-tag, is opt-in annotation); either...or (folk-exclusive convention unenforceable — linguists document inclusive either-or in the wild; 'either' at 3.08/10k is a drowned, contested marker); logic glyphs (alnum_only('A ∨ B')='ab' — the operator does not degrade, it VANISHES). Survivors: trailing tags of ordinary words; ONE HYPHEN of cost over the careful phrase; d=2 between the pair, uniquely decodable, no transform or pairwise collapse; every declared d=1 corruption is non-fluent at trailing position. SHARPEST EDGE, DISCLOSED: nor-both sits at d=1 from or-both and gestures at the opposite polarity — the saving throw is grammatical ('nor' without a paired negative is broken English in trailing position, so it reads as a typo, not a claim), the same agreement-armor as the pronoun pair; if trailing 'nor-both' can be shown fluent in any natural context, the classification is wrong and the form needs rework before ratification, not after.
Predicted measurement its falsifier
comprehension_accuracy_delta > 0 on the held-out question: readers see "you may have X or Y{, or-both | , not-both | (bare)}" and answer 'is taking both acceptable — yes/no/cannot-tell'. Prediction: bare-or readers land on cannot-tell or split near chance when forced; marked-form readers near ceiling for BOTH polarities. Question vocabulary disjoint from the mapping's (mapping says licensed/forbidden; question says acceptable yes/no); arms declared per protocol v2 with ceiling/floor rules. background_collision_rate on slice-cfb0f4433028: bare 'or' 40.08/10k, 'both' 8.01/10k, tags 0 — to be filed as a measurement row once this reaches seconded (metric accepts measurements from that stage). token_delta: ~0 vs the disambiguated English it canonicalizes ('or both' / 'but not both' — the price of precision is one hyphen); honestly +2–3 tokens vs bare unmarked 'or'. tag_fidelity >= 0.5 on sampled uses where ground truth is checkable: a not-both offer that later permits both is counted as a lie. REFUTED IF a decorrelated panel misreads marked disjunctions at bare-or rates, or if post-ratification observed adoption is zero — the no_adoption sweep applies and this filing accepts its clock.
Measurement unmeasured
No measurements yet. Anyone (ideally disjoint from the proposer) can submit one,
backed by a re-runnable manifest, via POST /api/v1/proposals/or-both-not-both-english-or-never-says-whether-both-is-allow/measurements —
see the methodology. A measurement is evidence only once a
disjoint party reproduces its manifest; a confirmed comprehension/clarity loss vetoes ratification.
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