Grimmer Girl here, a few episodes back I was talking about starting sentences with

coordinated conjunctions. And I mentioned that one way of remembering the

coordinating conjunctions is the word fanboys, whose letters stand for four and

nor, but or yet, and so. However, I kept the focus on the conjunctions and but and

or because the other conjunctions are rather different from these three. Well

today we're gonna look at exactly how different four nor yet and so are. In this

episode I'll refer to coordinating conjunctions as coordinators for short

unless I need to compare them to subordinating conjunctions. Now if the

coordinators don't all behave alike, how did they get lumped together in the

first place and how did the word fanboys come to be the canonical mnemonic

for remembering them? In a paper titled The Myth of Fanboys, Brett Reynolds

writes that his earliest find for the mnemonic is in the 1951 book learning to

write. Since then membership in the class of coordinating conjunctions has to

some extent crystallized around the seven that fanboys cover. But Reynolds

points out that there hasn't always been agreement. Some of the lists he

cite include all the fanboy conjunctions plus whereas another list leaves out

yet and so. Still another list includes a few transition words and phrases such

as however only still therefore and then. So what do coordinators have in common?

Two things. First they can take two words or phrases of the same category and

join them to make a larger word or phrase of that same category. Second they

need to come between the two items they connect or if they're connecting more

than two they need to come right before the last item. Some coordinators can

...