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Between or among?

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At our last Editors’ Circle, we discussed some common grammar mistakes that almost everyone gets wrong, using this list as a starting point. Someone raised the issue of  when to use ‘between’ and ‘among’, which is not on the list.

The common rule is that  ‘between’ is used for two choices and ‘among’ for more than two.
For example: he is between two jobs; she divided the cake among the six of us.

However, it’s not simple as that.

You can also use ‘between’ when talking about distinct items even if they are more than two.
For example: The negotiations between the United Kingdom, Germany and France were going well.
But, The negotiations among the countries were going well.

As an aside, we all agreed that amongst should never be used in place of among – it’s just too old-fashioned. Similarly, we decided that ‘whom’ should be avoided at all costs. With whom did you meet? sounds old-fashioned. Rather simplify the sentence: Who did you meet?

Linguistic false friends

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Cognates: words that sound similar in different languages often turn out to be ‘false friends’. I found quite a number of examples in a book I was editing. Overall the book was fairly well structured and written. Yet, you could tell which chapters were written by non-English mother tongue speakers,  not so much by the style but by those ‘false friends’.

Here are some of them:

“Countries disposing of natural resources”, which I changed to “Countries with natural resources at their disposal”. The French disposant de was translated as disposing of‘instead of at their disposal or (depending on the content) with.

“… byzantine arcanes of financial markets”. Arcanes is a adjective in English, not a noun so I changed it to byzantine mysteries.

“pretending that the US financial system was the standard for the world”. Changed pretending to claiming (incorrect translation of prétendre).

However, it is true that English is a very versatile language!

My favourite (to date) of a “new” English idiom is this:
“… begs the pregnant question.”  A wonderful mix of pregnant pause and begs the question.