Apple permits "then" to be used as a coord. conjunction in instructions?

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Tom Johnson reports: <<I have never been more baffled, astonished, and 
completely nonplussed about a point of grammar before.>>

Clearly you haven't been paying attention. <g> At the no-longer-tender 
age of 43, grammar continues to baffle, amuses, and astound me--which 
is part of the fun of working as an editor and trying to explain our 
language to younger editors who haven't yet learned to relax and just 
accept the <ahem> occasional </ahem> bit of bizarreness.

<<Apparently, for the last 6 months I have been harboring an incorrect 
sense of condescension toward what I believed to be a complete 
grammatical error... the use of "then" as a coordinating conjunction... 
Yet according to the Apple style guide -- which is not an insignificant 
authority on matters of style -- when writing instructions that require 
the imperative mood (and instructions almost always require this mood), 
the use of "then" to separate two independent clauses "is OK." In other 
words, I can write, "Click the File menu, then select New and Open." 
Appalling.>>

I've got some bad news for you... <g> First, most authorities (such as 
my 1973 Random House Unabridged and the 2000 edition of the American 
Heritage Unabridged) note quite clearly that this use of "then" is 
actually an adverbial use, with the "and" left implicit as an 
ellipsis--in short, "then" takes the place of "and then", and your 
coordinate conjunction ("and") is still there where it should be, just 
formatted as hidden text. <g> English is somewhat... um... promiscuous 
about the use of ellipsis, but that's also one of the joys and powers 
of the language.

Second, beware the difference between prescriptive grammar ("English as 
she should be spoken according to [fill in name of authority here]") 
and descriptive grammar ("English as she is actually spoke by the 
populace"). The use of "then" in place of "and then" has a long and 
proud history because it obeys what is arguably the only important rule 
of grammar: the structure of the sentence must be such as to make the 
meaning of each word and phrase unequivocal.

If you dissect any grammatical rule--and I am distinguishing these 
rules from the so-called "rules" of style or usage--you'll see that the 
rule describes some of the deeper workings of how we speakers of a 
language parse that language's structure. In that sense, grammar is 
inherently descriptive, because it describes the underlying rules of 
what makes the language work; it is also inherently prescriptive in 
that it tells you what works, and what doesn't, thereby providing the 
tools to consciously think through communication problems until you 
have learned to subconsciously solve the problem.

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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