2021-05-29 Ref.: www.gotoknow.org#690964
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – B – between & among
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง between = ‘bih-TWEEN’
ออกเสียง among = ‘uh-MUHNG’
Dictionary.com
WORDS OFTEN CONFUSED WITH BETWEEN
Among expresses a relationship
when more than two persons orthings are involved:
Distrust spread among even his strongest supporters.
Between is used when only two persons or things are involved:
between you and me; to decide between tea and coffee.
Between also continuesto be used,
as it has been throughout its entire history,
to express a relationship of persons or things consideredindividually,
no matter how many:
Tossing up coins between three people always takes a little working out.
Between holding public office, teaching, and writing, she has little free time.
USAGE NOTE FOR BETWEEN
Although notgenerally accepted as good usage,
between you and I isheard
occasionally in the speech of educated persons.
By the traditional rulesof grammar,
when a pronoun is the object of a preposition,
that pronoun should be in the objective case:
between you and me; between her and them.
The use of the nominative form (I, he, she, they, etc.)
arises partly as overcorrection,
the reasoning being
that if it is correct at the end ofa sentence like It is I,
it must also be correctat the end of the phrase between you and ….
The choiceof pronoun also owes something to
the tendency for the final pronoun in a compound object
to be in the nominative case after a verb:
It was kind of you to invite my wife and I.
This too is notgenerally regarded as good usage.
The construction between each (or every)
is sometimes objected toon the grounds that
between calls for a plural or compoundobject.
However, the construction is old and fully standard
when the sense indicates that more than one thing is meant:
Spread softened butter between each layer of pastry.
There were marigolds peeking between every row of vegetables.
The construction
between … to is a blend of between … and (between 15 and 25 miles)
and from … to (from 15 to 25 miles).
It occurs occasionally in informal speech but not in formal speech or writing.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Between vs. Among: Usage Guide
There is a persistent butunfounded notion that
between can beused only of two items
and that among must be used for more than two.
Between has been used of more than two since Old English;
it is especially appropriate to denote a one-to-one relationship,
regardless of the number of items.
It can be used when the number is unspecified
economic cooperation between nations,
when more than two are enumerated between you and me
and the lamppost
partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia — Nathaniel Benchley,
and even when only one item is mentioned (but repetition is implied).
pausing between every sentence to rap the floor — George Eliot
Among ismore appropriate
where the emphasis is on distributionrather than individual relationships.
discontent among the peasants
When among is automatically chosen for more than two,
English idiom may be strained.
a worthy book that nevertheless falls among many stools — John Simon
the author alternates among mod slang,
clichés and quotes from literary giants — A. H. Johnston
Abused, Confused, & Misused Words by Mary Embree
Between = in the space separating two objects
It was hard to choose between vanilla and chocolate.
[Among is used when more than two persons or things are involved.
Between is used when only two persons or things are involved.]
Not to be confused with:
among = in association or connection with; surrounded by:
You are among friends.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language,
between′ness n.
Usage Note:
The -tween in between comes from
the same Indo-European root that gave us two, twain, and duo,
and the -mong of among comes from an Old English word
that meant "crowd" or "throng."
It is thus unsurprising that a traditional rule requires
between to be used only for sentences involving two items
and among for sentences involving more than two.
Indeed, in sentences involving two items, no rule is needed;
native English speakers spontaneously use between
(as in the differences between [not among] karate and judo).
But when there are more than two items, practice is mixed.
Many careful writers observe a more subtle distinction,
using among when the sentence refers to the entities collectively
or as a mass, as in
There were many outstanding players
among the teams in the quarterfinal round
or A thistle is growing among the roses,
but preferring between when the sentence refers to
relationships involving particular pairs of entities from within the group,
as in We haven't yet assigned the matchups between teams
in the quarterfinal round or I have sand between my toes.
In such sentences, the twoness of between has not,
So, to speak, been lost in the crowd—
the pairings within the larger group are important
to the meaning of the sentence
and thus influence the writer's choice of preposition.
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary
be•tween′ness, n.
usage:
By traditional usage rules,
among expresses relationship when more than two are involved
and between is used for only two:
to decide between tea and coffee. between,
however, continues to be used, as it has been throughout its history,
to express relationship of persons or things considered individually,
no matter how many:
Between holding public office, teaching, and raising a family, she has little free time.
Between you and I, though heard occasionally
in the speech of even educated persons, is usually considered incorrect.
By the rules of grammar, any and all pronouns
that are the object of a preposition must be in the objective case:
between you and me; between her and them.
The construction between each (or every) is fully standard
when the sense indicates that more than one thing is meant:
Marigolds peeked between each row of vegetables.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Usage Notes
'Between' or 'Among': Which is correct?
Just between us: it's a complicated situation.
Most words gothrough life without much excitement,
doing their jobs and neverattracting much attention.
Others,
such as dilapidated, stir up a small amount of fuss
(at one point, some thought that
referring toa wood house as dilapidated was incorrect,
since the word is rooted in the Latin word forstone, lapis).
Some words,
such as like,are just provocateurs.
Between isone of those unruly few.
The first edition of Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926)
listed five areasof concern for this word, and the second edition (1965) added a sixth.
Among these werethe word’s use as a hypercorrection,
in the dread phrase “between you and I,”
and when used in certain circumstances precedingthe word each.
For today,
however, the only form of between’s attention-seeking behavior
we will look at is when it is used in place of among.
As is the case with many usage issues in English,
it is now highly likely that some readers have developed
an eye twitchat the thought of thisapplication,
while others are responding with
“I don’t really see what the problem is….”
If you area member of this latter group the issue is this:
Among may apply to any number; between applies to two only.
— Frank Vizetelly, A Desk-book of Errors in English, 1920
It is perhaps impreciseto refer to Vizetelly’s admonition above as a rule,
but since “strong recommendation based on ignorance of lexical history and disregard for nuance”
is too long to write every time, let’s call it a rule. So why do we have it?
Although he may not have been the first to say so,
Samuel Johnson in 1755 added a usage note,
curiously formatted as the definition ofthe sixth sense of between,
which read“Between is properly used of two,
and among of more;
but perhaps this accuracy is not always preserved.”
A footnote by the grammarian Goold Brown in his 1851
The Grammar of English Grammars snidely notes that
one of his contemporaries had made a mistake in his use of the word,
since it “cannot have reference to more than two things or parties.”
However, betwixt these two books (in 1828)
we find that Noah Webster defined between
as “Belonging to two or more….
We observe that between is not restricted to two.”
What to do? Well, we cannot tell you what you should do,
but we can tell you something of the history of how the word has been used.
There is considerable evidenceof between
being used in reference to more than two things.
Actually, it is more than considerable evidence;
the condemned useof between was in existence for 800 years
before Johnson made note of it.
The Oxford English Dictionary has evidence of between
used in this manner from 971,
and offers a succinct yet powerful explanation
for why this use of between is legitimate.
In all senses, between has been, from its earliest appearance,
extended tomore than two….
It is stillthe only word available to express
the relation of a thing to many surrounding things severally and individually,
among expressing a relation to them collectively and vaguely.
— Oxford English Dictionary (oed.com), “between” (sense 19)
Our own citation files have many examples of
between being applied to settings of more than two,
often by writers of some renown,
and often used in a way where among would sound strained.
This, of course, is between our three discreet selves.
— Jane Austen, letter, 11 Oct. 1813
Undoubtedly there is something in common between the three (Dante. Chaucer, Villon)
— T. S. Eliot, “Dante” in Selected Essays, 1932
Constantine a little before his death,
upon the importunity of the souldiers made Dalmatius his brothers sonne Caesar also;
but by the same souldiers he was oppressed,
and so the Empire was divided betweene the three brothers.
— Alexander Ross, The History of the World, 1652
None of this should be taken as a suggestionthat between and among are interchangeable.
The two words have some degree of overlap,
but also significant differences.
Additionally, none of the above should be taken to mean that
you may not have preferences in this matter,
and you should feel entirely comfortable
following your own self-imposed guidelines
for when to use between and when to use among.
It should, however, be taken as a refutation of the over-generalizing rule that
Frank Vizetelly espoused earlier in this article.
It is not difficultto find cases
in which among sounds wrong no matter what the number
(when was the last time you heard anyone describe being
“among the devil and the deep blue sea”?).
And as for the question of
whether between may be used for numbers greater than two,
we have only to look elsewhere in Vizetelly’s own book
to see that sometimes this works quite well.
bring, carry, fetch: Discriminate carefully between these words.
— Frank Vizetelly, A Desk-book of Errors in English, 1920
Discriminate carefully between these words, indeed.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Usage Notes
'Between' or 'Among' (or 'Amongst')?
What's a little usage disagreement
between/among/amongst friends?
What to Know
Between is typically used when referring to two things,
like "between a rock and a hard place,"
while among is used for a greater number.
However, these rules should be reconsidered
if the sentence sounds awkward or overly pretentious.
Likewise
amongst can be used in some rare instances in place of 'among,'
but should not be used to make sentences sound more educated.
If you're at all interested in grammar,
then you've probably heard the maxim about among and between:
only use between when you're referring to two things
("just between us," "between a rock and a hard place,"
"you must choose between cake or death"),
and use among when referring to more than two
("you're among friends," "among the many options available to you").
But like many maxims about grammar and usage,
this isn't necessarily the case.
History of 'Among' and 'Between'
Both among and between date back to Old English.
Among was originally a phrase (on gemonge) that meant "in a crowd,"
and the noun gemonge came from a verb that means "to mingle or mix."
From the very beginning,
among has been used to refer to a position (literal or figurative)
in relation toa surrounding group of individuals,
like friends, or something taken to be a composite, like a basket of flowers.
Between, meanwhile, began its life a little after among.
It's direct from Old English, and is related to the word twā,
which means "two."
This is likely the reason why some people insisted that
it can only be used of two people or things—it's from the word "two"!
But between originallywas like among: it referred to a number of people or things.
In fact, our earliest use of between in English
is in reference to the Apostles,
and our sources confirm that there were definitely more than two of them.
Interchangeability
That's not to say that between and among
have exactly the same use or connotation, though.
We use between when we want to express a relation to things
and have them considered as individual and usually equal entities:
between the devil and the deep blue sea;
the restaurant between my house and my work;
a treaty between nations.
This connotationstems from an earlier use of between
that referred to a point between two places,
or travel between two specific points.
Among,on the other hand is the best word to use
when referring to things collectively and imprecisely:
for this reason, among many others; no honor among thieves.
Like many rules around use,
you'd be wiser to follow your own native sense of the language
than hewing strictly to them.
Substituting among for a more idiomatic between
can createmore awkwardness than it solves:
Mr. Mifflin has protested since 1914 that Ambrose Bierce
would show up some day and flatly refute every single thing
I have written about the amazing quadrangle that existed among Hodgson, Conrad, Nugent,
and Eve.
—James Thurber, letter, 2 May 1946
Yes, Thurber used the "correct" among here, since there are more than two people being discussed.
But it sounds awkward,
especially given that among connotes vagueness,
and following it up with the names of four distinct people,
considered by Thurber to be on equal footing
—in a very quadrangle, even—negates among's essential vagueness.
Or consider this use of among, which was definitely chosen over between entirely due to the numbers:
The psychiatrist said under cross-examination...
that he would include simultaneous intercourse among two men and a woman
—a scene shown in the film—in the category of normal...
—New York Times, 30 Dec. 1972
Some things in life shouldn't be so vague.
'Amongst' Usage
This sort of overcorrection is common
when a writer wants to sound fancy or educated,
but there is another overcorrection that gets grief from usage commentators:
the substitution of the variant amongst for among or between.
For instance,
Bryan Garner, in Garner's Modern English Usage,
gives a perfect example of the criticism against amongst,
calling it an archaism that "is pretentious at best,"
but our evidence doesn't confirm that view.
Amongst iscertainly less common than among,
and it's used more in British English than it is in American English
("Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency...").
Those two facts may be reason enough
for amongst to stand out to an American speaker.
But we have many not-so-quaint and unpretentious American uses of it in our files:
Pelican is a wild town where one year before there had been a shootout of sorts amongst some fishermen,...
—Donn Groom, Cruising World, March 1984
As many as 29 potential sites were found, each of which offered a dead spot amongst the maze of microwave beams.
—John W. Verity, Datamation, July 1982
Amongst the evidence were verbal slams from such network luminaries ...
—John Weisman, TV Guide, 11 Sept. 1981
According to a recently released survey by ACNielsen,
satellite-TV penetration into Saudi homes is now 80 percent:
"Amongst the highest in the world."
—Christopher Dickey et al., Newsweek, 22 July 2002
It is, however, a little pretentious
when swapped for among infixed phrases and idioms
like among friends and first among equals.
What should a discerning reader and writer do, then?
Use your instincts.
If swapping among for between sounds off somehow,
then it probably is.
Even the best usage writers have set forth the among/between diktat and then immediately strayed:
among, between: Among may apply to any number; between applies to two only.
—Frank Vizetelly, A Desk-Book of Errors in English, 1906, p. 14
bring, carry, fetch: Discriminate carefully between these words.
—Frank Vizetelly, A Desk-Book of Errors in English, 1906, p. 40
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
The In-Betweens: 7 Words From the Middle
Center of the sandwich kind of words
In-between
When we say that someone or something
is in between two other people or things,
we mentally place them in the middle, withsomething on either side.
After all, between refers to that space in the middle, right?
It does—but it hasn't always.
The Old English word that eventually
became between is actually made up of two parts:
the prefix be- and the word twēonum. Twēonum is related to twā,
the Old English word that gave us "two";
it's the dative plural form of an old distributive numeral
that might be best translated as "two each."
You'd expect that be- would mean "in," but it doesn't:
betwēonum is literally "near two each."
In its earliest uses, it wasn't alwaysin reference
to the intermediaryposition of two places, things, or people.
It was also used to express reciprocalaction
by two people towards each other.
Though some claim that in between is redundant,
we have evidence of it going back to at least the 1500s, if not earlier
—one of our early uses notes that
"The Sea brake in between Wisbich, and Walsockenne."
The collocation was so common, in fact,
that it eventually gave rise to the hyphenated in-between,
a noun that refers to an intermediary.
Threshold
One of the most common in-betweens
we encounter every day is the threshold.
Whenever you leave your house, walk from one room to another,
or enter a building, you are crossing a threshold.
Threshold is an old word, dating back over 1,000 years in English,
and its origins are slightly obscured.
Its Old English ancestor threscwald or threscwold
is cousin to the verbthat gave us thresh,
and this verb in turn refers toseparating grain from chaff
by beating it with something (like a stick or a flail).
But there's nothing inthe historical record
that directly ties threshing to the threshold.
The threshold of a door is actually
the horizontal floor piece that you walk over
whenever you move through a doorway,
and this is one of the uses we give it today.
But the earliest uses of threshold
refer to a different type of boundary:
an Old English translation of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae
uses the word in a sentence about how the sea was made
so that it didn't overstep the "threshold," or boundary, of the earth.
We still use threshold withthat broader "boundary, limit" sense today:
As members left a meeting about the bill, many said they were encouraged
by their first impressions of the text but were hesitant to say
if it would clear the 50 vote threshold for passage.
—Veronica Stracqualursi, Adam Kelsey, and Ali Rogin, ABCNews.com, 23 June 2017
Betwixt
Betwixt isnow old-fashioned sounding,
but it's a close cousinof between:
the -twixt of betwixt traces back to the same root
as the -tween of between.
Not surprisingly, betwixt means "between."
It may seem odd that between and betwixt bothexist,
but in Old and Middle English, these compounds abounded.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists
between, betwixt, betwixen, betwihen, bitwih, and bitweies
as variants on this theme, and all related to each other.
Most of them passed out of common use by the 1400s,
though betwixen stuck it out until the 1800s
and betwixt still survives in limiteduse.
Betwixt often shows up in the old-fashioned phrase betwixt and between.
It means "neither one thing or the other,"
and is a prime example of redundancies which settle into established use.
Devil and the deep blue sea
Many phrases that evoke in-between-ness
also situate the speaker between two undesirable end points,
like the devil and the deep blue sea.
Ocean lovers may object to that characterization of the deep blue sea,
but this isa later change to the original phrase,
which was the devil and the dead sea.
Why the devil, and whythe dead sea? No one knows.
The phrase first shows up in a 1621 English translation
of a collection of Latin and Greek proverbscompiled by Erasmus.
It's the translation of the medieval Latin
proverb a fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi
—which has nothing to do with the devil or the sea.
A better translationof the Latin
would be "a precipice in front, wolves behind."
Scylla and Charybdis
Between the devil and the deep blue sea
has an echoin the phrase between Scylla and Charybdis.
The latter phrase also refers to
being stuckbetween two undesirable (and dangerous) options.
The phrase appears with this meaning in the mid-1500s.
It draws from Greek mythology.
In Homer's Odyssey and Ovid's Metamorphoses,
Scylla is an immortal monster with six heads,
each on a long neck, and twelve feet, who lives in a cave near a narrow strait
and feasts on those who are unfortunate enough to sail by.
Odysseus encountered her in the Odyssey
as he sailed through a narrow strait; she ate six of his men.
On the other side of the strait was Charybdis, another immortal monster.
According to Homer, she lived under a fig tree near the shore
and swallowed the sea three times a day,
thereby creating a dangerous whirlpool with shifting currents.
A shipwrecked Odysseus escaped her by clinging to a tree
and waiting for her to spit back out an improvised raft.
The pairing of Scylla and Charybdis in mythology
gave laterEnglish speakers an easy shorthand
to refer to being stuck in the middle of a dangerous or difficult situation.
Eventually, Scylla and Charybdis were associated with the Strait of Messina:
a narrow channel between Sicily and Italy
known for its rocky coastline and dangerous currents.
A prominent outcropping on the Italian mainland is known
as the Rock of Scylla, and some navigators throughout history
have noted that the currents in the strait do form a whirlpool on the Sicilian coastline
opposite Scylla.
Interstice
Sometimes the in-between isn't about what's there;
it's about what's not.
Interstice is a technical word that came into written use in the 1400s,
and our earliest evidence of it refers to
studying "the interstice of sterres [stars]."
In case we aren't sure what interstice refers to here,
the translator helpfully glosses it for us as "the space bytwene."
Interstice went from macro to micro in use:
in the 1600s, we have evidence of interstice
used to refer to "the place between the browes, the very seat of reason";
in the 1700s, we read about the "interstices of water,"
which are "always found full of air";
and in the 1930s, interstice was applied to the nonmetal atoms
or ions that were situated in the spaces of a nonmetal crystalline lattice.
In current use,
interstice is used to refer to a small space between things,
and it appears quite often in the plural (interstices).
It's common in the sciences.
Liminal
Not all in-betweens are static.
Liminal is a word that, in its most common extended sense,
refers toa state, place, or condition of transition:
the liminal state between waking and sleeping, or between life and death.
When liminal first appeared in written use,
it had a very specific meaning that referred to
something (such as a physical stimulus)
which was just barely perceptible,
or just barely capable of eliciting a response.
This meaning is still in use today in constructions
like "liminal auditory stimuli."
The word is the adjectival offspring of the noun limen,
which refers to the point at which
a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced,
and was borrowed wholesale from Latin, where it means "threshold."
While liminal appears primarily informal or academic writing
and may be unfamiliar to many,
limen is also the root word of the more common subliminal
("below the threshold of perception").
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Between you and I
Between you and me,
there seems to be some confusion about pronouns
when we use compound subjects (“you and me”).
Though nobody is certain why such confusion exists
—such errors are nearly impossible for native speakers of most languages
—it may have to do with the idea that me seems more emphatic
(and less polite and fancy-sounding) in some situations than I,
and that the error is a hypercorrection.
When we use compound subjects,
the rules for pronoun use don’t change,
but it frequently seems that there is more ambiguity
about whether to use I or me.
We sometimes hear sentences like:
Me and my friends went to the movies.
You and me could grab some lunch.
But for subjects, I is always correct,
and it’s preferable to say things like:
My team and I will be at the meeting.
Your sister and I are going swimming tomorrow.
For objects, me is always correct:
Come to lunch with Mary and me.
For my roommates and me, tomorrow is easier.
You can check to see if you’re correct
by eliminating the compound subject:
for “Come to lunch with Mary and I,” remove“Mary,”
and you get “Come to lunch with I,” whichyour ear will tell you is wrong.
Dictionary of Problem Words in English
Between you and me
This is a standard phrase, grammatically and idiomatically acceptable.
It is overused, however, in situations
in which a speaker or writer attempts to create
an atmosphere of familiarity or shared secrets:
“Don’t tell anyone, but just between you and me ….”
Between is a preposition in this construction
and requires a following pronoun (or noun) in the objective case:
me, him, her.
Avoid the mistake
of saying “between you and I” or “betweenyou and she.”
Collins COBUILD English Usage
between
1. describing position
If something is between two things,
it has one of the things on one side of it
and the other thing on the other side of it.
Janice was standing between the two men.
Northampton is roughly halfway between London and Birmingham.
Be Careful!
Don't say that something is 'between' several things.
You say that it is among them.
See among
2. differences
You talk about a difference between two or more things or people.
Don't use 'among'.
What is the difference between football and soccer?
There isn't much difference between the three parties.
3. choosing
When someone makes a choice,
you say that they choose between two or more things or people.
Don't use 'among'.
It was difficult to choose between the two candidates.
You can choose between tomato, cheese or meat sauce on your pasta.
You say that someone chooses between one thing or person and another.
She had to choose between work and her family.
Collins English Usage
USAGE FOR BETWEEN
After distribute and words with a similar meaning,
among shouldbe used rather than between:
this enterprise issued shares which were distributed among its workers
Collins COBUILD English Usage
among
1. groups
If you are among a group of people or things,
you are surrounded by them.
Dev wandered among his guests.
Among his baggage was a medicine chest.
Be Careful!
Don't say that you are 'among' two people or things.
You say that you are between them.
Myra and Barbara sat in the back, the baby between them.
The island is midway between São Paulo and Porto Alegre.
See between
The form amongst is sometimes used,
but is more formal than among.
The old farmhouse was hidden amongst orchards.
2. dividing
You can say that
something is divided among or between a group of people.
There is no difference in meaning.
He divided his money among his brothers and sisters.
Different scenes from the play are divided between five couples.
The form amongst is sometimes used, but is more formal than among.
I heard that flour was being distributed amongst the citizens.
3. differences
Be Careful!
Don't use 'among' when you are talking about differences.
Don't say, for example,
'I couldn't see any difference among the three chairs'.
You say 'I couldn't see any difference between the three chairs'.
Common Errors in English Usage Dictionary
Between
“Between 1939 to 1945” is obviously incorrectto most people
—it should be “between 1939 and1945"
—but the error is not so obvious
when it is written thus: “between 1939-1949.”
In this case, the “between” should be dropped altogether.
Also incorrect are expressions
like “there were between 15 to 20 people at the party.”
This should read“between 15 and 20 people.”
