Binomial expressions | OUPblog

Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump

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By Edwin L. Battistella

July 29th 2026

The term "binomial expression" sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x3 + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x2 − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2.

But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did.

English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called "Studies in Irreversible Binomials") and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, "Binomials and Pitch Accent," looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called "Word Order") proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, "The Chicken or the Egg."

Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in "it’s right there in black and white," gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go?

In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in "We were looking at new tables and chairs" rather than "new chairs and tables." But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned "chairs and tables." And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song "Piano Man," with its barfly "making love to his tonic and gin." The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with "the regular crowd shuffles in."

Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression "eat your cake and have it too" rather than the more common "have your cake and eat it too." That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture.

Some frozen binomials are best left alone.

Featured image by Ling App on Unsplash.

Edwin L. Battistella taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he served as a dean and as interim provost. His books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others?, Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, and Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump.

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Robert Ross29th July 2026

The order of...