In recent years we have heard the term “rather than» with value disjunctivereplacing “or” or “or”. This use of the phrase – to give an example “we can eat pizza rather than sushi” – however, it is a mistake increasingly widespread, also thanks to its widespread use on TV and in newspapers. The “rather than”, in fact, is a conjunctive phrase with adversative value: is used like “rather than” And “instead of” to express a contrast or logical opposition, the preference of one element over the other (“better A rather than B”). To clarify:
Give me a hand rather That sit there on your ass” (you could also say: give me a hand instead of sitting there on your ass. I’d rather go on holiday in the mountains rather than to the sea.
The error lies, as we said at the beginning, in using this phrase with a disjunctive value (with the meaning “or”), because as the Accademia della Crusca reports “it can create substantial ambiguities in communication and compromise the fundamental function of language”. For example: In the sentence “We could go to the cinema this evening rather than at the theatre” the statement using “rather than” with disjunctive value can create misunderstandings. Whoever uttered the sentence means that one could go “to the cinema instead of the theatre” (adversative value) or that these are two equally valid alternatives (“to the cinema or to the theatre” with disjunctive value). According to what is reported in the text of the Accademia della Crusca, the use of “rather than” with disjunctive value ha northern origin and it is not born in popular speech, but in medium-high social environmentsprobably with a hint of linguistic snobbery. In fact, frequently terms and phrases that speakers perceive as “more cultured” are used more frequently even with improper uses, as in this case. The phenomenon is already attested in the early eighties among young Turin people and then spread on a national scale since the mid-1990sabove all thanks to the strong media exposure. In particular, television, radio, journalism and advertising have played a decisive role in propagating this use, which quickly moved from the media spotlight to the written and spoken language of use, progressively infiltrating formal and scholastic contexts as well.
