Neither...nor

Recently, a friend (whose first language is not English) said to me, “nor the coffee nor the tea are very good here.”  It was easy enough to understand what he was saying, but his expression prompted this post because it contained two errors that I sometimes find in my students’ work.

First, he was relying on a negation that is not usually found in standard written English.  In French we could say “ni l’un ni l’autre” (literally “nor one nor the other”).  However, “nor…nor” in English is chiefly poetic.  We usually use “neither…nor” to negate two options:

Option 1: The coffee is not very good here.

Option 2: The tea is not very good here.

Option 1 & 2 together: Neither the coffee nor the tea is very good here.

Second, when each one of the two options is singular, we use a singular verb with “neither…nor.”  In this case, coffee is singular and tea is singular.  Think of each sentence individually and use the verb from one of those sentences:

The coffee is not very good here.

The tea is not very good here.

Neither the coffee nor the tea is very good here.

If one option is singular and the other is plural, the verb agrees with the subject closest to the verb.

The coffee is not very good here.

The biscuits are not very good here.

Neither the coffee nor the biscuits are very good here.

Further, “neither…nor” should be used only with two options.  We usually write “neither A nor B,” not “neither A, B, C, nor D.” 

Despite the general truth of these rules, the OED provides some famous exceptions.  For example, Shakespeare has “nor…nor” and “neither A, B, C, nor D” in Measure for Measure:

             Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,
Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,
To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid moe thousand deaths: yet death we fear,
That makes these odds all even. (III, i, 32-41)

Resources

The Writing Center at The University of Wisconsin Madison has a good page on subject-verb agreement: there you can find examples of “neither…nor.”  Numbers 4, 5, and 6 of Capital Community College’s Subject-Verb Agreement page provides some practical and helpful examples.

Proprofs has a quiz for neither/nor and either/or.

Writingcare has a pretty good video clip explaining neither/nor and either/or: