Someone once asked me whether ‘and’ is a preposition or a conjunction. I thought this was an odd question at the time but, with the wisdom of experience and age, I have come to wonder whether there might indeed be some doubt as to the classification of this little functional word.

In recent years, I have been lumping all conjunctions, prepositions and referential words (like ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘who’, ‘that’ etc.) together and just calling them all ‘link-words’. They all do more or less the same kind of job and, although it is a humble one, it is vitally important. Consider the heavy lifting the word ‘it’ does (twice) in my last sentence. These lexical manual laborers account for around 25% of all written text in English and far outnumber verbs.

“And” is used in two distinct but obviously related ways. First to join two noun phrases or qualifiers (adjectives and the like) together (‘apples and pears’, ‘red and white stripes’); and, secondly, to indicate that one action follows or is accompanied by another (‘she closed the door and left’). In the case of the first of these uses, it behaves in a manner similar to the category of words described as ‘prepositions’ in the traditional nomenclature. However, when linking two phrases, it fits more comfortably into the ‘conjunctions’ category.

The hybrid nature of ‘and’ goes way back. Etymologically, it is a fusion of a variant of the very ancient ‘en/in’ preposition/prefix and the spatially referential word ‘da’=’there’. Literally, therefore, it originally meant ‘in there’ or ‘thereupon’ and was a far fancier formulation than it appears to be now, shorn even of its vowel and final consonantal cluster in ‘fish ‘n’ chips’ and ‘rock ‘n’ roll’. This etymology also shows that its original usage tended to be conjunctive rather than merely additive.

Being used simply to link nouns and adjectives into a chain was a big step down in the world for once haughty ‘and’. And its fall from grace has been so steep that some modern-day prescriptivist grammarians would forbid its use at the start of a sentence, even though (or perhaps because) this was its main and much nobler function in pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon England.