Pylimitics

A “collocation” is two words joined by “and” or “or.” They’re quite common; you’ll immediately recognize “ladies and gentlemen,” for example. There’s also “night and day,” “bed and breakfast,” “bread and butter,” “salt and pepper,” and so on. 

These are all in their common order; you seldom hear “gentlemen and ladies,” and I’m pretty sure you NEVER hear “butter and bread” or “breakfast and bed.” It’s not entirely clear why a particular order seems to be preferred for collocations. In some cases you can suppose there’s a logic to it — you have to have bread before you can apply butter, for example — but it’s dangerous to impute logical motives to people’s everyday habits!

It’s not easy to find any reasons for the typical order of collocations like “knife and fork” or “thunder and lightning” (which, by the way, is in reverse order phenomenologically), but there is a way to discover how often the order tends to be used versus reversed: Google NGram. You can query comparative usage of “ladies and gentlemen” versus “gentlemen and ladies” in books since 1800, and find out that while “ladies and gentlemen” had a massive lead around 1880, with another spike around 1930, the reverse order never disappeared and the two are now closer in usage — although usage of either one is lower than it has been. Here’s the link.

You can easily find out the trends in “black and white” and “thunder and lightning” (by the way, in German, “thunder and lightning” is “donner und blitzen” — I think I’ve heard that somewhere before…). 

Some collocations are so well known they’ve been used as titles — or possibly, some collocations have been used as titles, so they’re very well known. “War and peace,” for example. Except it turns out that until about 1918 “peace and war” was used more often. Since Tolstoy’s novel was published in 1869, it’s unclear why “war and peace” in that order took another half century to overtake “peace and war” (it wasn’t because the book appeared in English around that time; the first English translation was in 1899). 

There are also collocations joined by “or,” and you can check these too. “Or” collocations look like order is more variable; “right or left” is used just about as much as “left or right.” On the other hand, “now or never” is used far more than “never or now” (which is almost never used), although “never or now” turns out to have been the title of at least two songs and one movie. 

It can be kind of fun (for a particular value of “fun” of course) to fool around with Google NGram and collocations. Give it a try… sooner or later.