Crimes of Illiteracy

The overused (and incorrect) answering-machine greeting
(or parallel construction in English from a math geek's perspective)

"Leave your name, number, and a brief message."

Thousands of people use this greeting, not knowing that it’s a grammatical atrocity.

Why is it? Because it violates the principle of parallel construction—the word “and” doesn’t properly connect the three items in the list.

What does that mean? I’ve always liked math, so here’s a math analogy that goes back to seventh grade.

The distributive property says that, for example, 7 × (2 + 3) = (7 × 2) + (7 × 3). In English, the same property holds. Think of the items in the list in the sentence as being the items in parentheses that get added (“and” sort of represents addition, with the commas and the word “and” separating the added items, right?). Now, depending on where you put the parentheses, the sentence can be read in a couple of ways:

• “Leave your (name, number, and a brief message)” distributes to “Leave your name” + “Leave your number” + “Leave your a brief message.” The last item (“Leave your a brief message”) doesn’t make sense.“
• Leave (your name, number, and a brief message)” distributes to “Leave your name” + “Leave number” + “Leave a brief message.” This time it’s the second item that’s wrong.

So we need to change the sentence so that it makes sense when it gets distributed. We can do that in one of three ways:

• “Leave your name, your number, and a brief message.”
• “Leave your name, number, and brief message.”
• “Leave your name and number and a brief message.”

If we check the third correction, there are two distributions because there are two instances of the word “and”: “Leave (your (name and number) and a brief message)” distributes to “Leave your (name and number)” + “Leave a brief message,” which distributes to “Leave your name” + “Leave your number” + “Leave a brief message” - which is what we wanted to say. Eccola!

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of answering machines, here’s a purely content-related peeve that has nothing to do with grammar: messages that start, “Hi, Seth. How are you?” It's as if the caller expected an answer before leaving the rest of the message.