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Topic: Why use "on either side" when you mean "on both sides"?

Anonymous 8f5fd985ee494c7c679c94d3ef191e79 started this discussion 2 months (2008-10-04 14:37:27 UTC) ago:

"either" can mean both "one of them" or "both". Why be ambiguous?

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Anonymous 6d73aa4758ee4e8aa343acede9af82fc replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 14:57:05 UTC) ago, 20 minutes later (#66,189):

When somebody says "Put the twigs on either side of the fence." it doesn't mean both sides, it means one side or the other. In other words, it doesn't matter which side you put the twigs.

Anonymous 8f5fd985ee494c7c679c94d3ef191e79 (OP) replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 15:01:24 UTC) ago, 4 minutes later (#66,191):

@66,189

… and it can also mean both sides.

Anonymous 6d73aa4758ee4e8aa343acede9af82fc replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 15:49:27 UTC) ago, 48 minutes later (#66,200):

> Either is an English pronoun, adjective, and conjunction, meaning one, or the other, of two choices. Its origin is from Old English ǽghweþer, which literally analyses as a >compound word "any - whether."

> Either/or means "one, or the other, but not both". Its negative is neither/nor, meaning "none of them".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Either

Anonymous 8f5fd985ee494c7c679c94d3ef191e79 (OP) replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 16:16:47 UTC) ago, 27 minutes later (#66,212):

@66,200

In that case, people are using it incorrectly…

Anonymous 2c3cc5bf0c58bcc77fdc7a6f1b19d212 replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 19:30:02 UTC) ago, 3 hours later (#66,279):

@66,200

http://www.anontalk.com/topic/12967

Anonymous 28b6edd55211cd757cad26b3b8f64919 replied with this 2 months (2008-10-04 21:06:26 UTC) ago, 2 hours later (#66,301):

You can walk on either side of the street to get where you are going. To say you are able to walk on both sides of the street to get where you wanna go would be incorrect.