The English Oracle

Both or only the first, but never just the second

--------------------------------------------------
Rise to the top 3% as a developer or hire one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
--------------------------------------------------

Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: The World Wide Mind

--

Chapters
00:00 Both Or Only The First, But Never Just The Second
01:32 Answer 1 Score 3
02:03 Answer 2 Score 0
02:16 Accepted Answer Score 7
02:42 Answer 4 Score 0
03:03 Thank you

--

Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...

--

Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

--

Tags
#wordchoice

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 7


In the real example,

You should probably use javascript or jQuery to accomplish this

you can achieve the objective by reversing the order and adding a couple of words to emphasise the difference:

You should probably use jQuery or just plain JavaScript to accomplish this.

Thus jQuery implies JavaScript; you could have JavaScript without jQuery; or neither.




ANSWER 2

Score 3


Converting comment to answer

Can/May I serve you some fish with or without chips?

UPDATE: Would of course have been lovely to have seen the original reason for the question since I have A LOT more experience with JavaScript/jQuery than fish&chips

Since JavaScript is built-in whatever device that could run jQuery, the sentence Andrew wrote, is understandable by anyone versed in the art.
jQuery is a JavaScript library so the or relates only to plain JavaScript or vanilla.js as some people like to call it now




ANSWER 3

Score 0


Converting comment to answer:

You could phrase it this way:

"You can choose Y if you have X."
"If you have X, you can choose to get Y".




ANSWER 4

Score 0


You could describe this process as an incremental choice. You are making a base choice (whether or not to use javascript) and then a choice about whether to add a supplement (whether or not to add jQuery to the use of javascript).

The implication is that you cannot make the second choice unless you affirmatively make the first choice.