What a Good Dog You Have!

*This piece was originally published in my (now shuttered) Rhetoric in Real Life Substack.

The title of this article is what I said to the elderly gentleman I passed while on my morning run today. His dog, also clearly elderly, walked slowly alongside him, unleashed and peaceful.

“Yeah, she’s a good dog, but she’s a female, so she has her days,” was his reply.

I want to talk about the words “but” and “so” in this sentence. Both those words are coordinating conjunctions, and there are five others, seven total in the English language (you may have learned the acronym FANBOYS: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).

One job of coordinating conjunctions is to join two or more independent clauses into one sentence. An independent clause is simply a group of words that could also be a stand-alone sentence. In the man’s sentence above, those clauses are:

1. Yeah, she’s a good dog,

2. but she’s a female,

3. so she has her days.

Let’s address the first coordinating conjunction (CC): “But” is a CC of contradiction; it implies an opposition between the things it joins. It signals something unexpected.

For example, I might say, “I had a root canal, but it wasn’t unpleasant.”

The reason the “but” works in this case is that we *expect* a root canal to be unpleasant. The word “but” sparks a little mental signal that there’s a contradiction coming.

It would NOT make sense for me to say, “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, but it was fun.”

The reason that sentence doesn’t work is that the word “but” implies something surprising or unexpected, but there isn’t anything unexpected here; a picnic on a lovely autumn day with a best friend SHOULD be fun.

The sentence should’ve been stated, “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, and it was fun” or “I had a picnic with my best friend on a beautiful autumn day, so it was fun.”

The CC “and” implies “go together,” whereas the CC “so” implies “cause and effect,” as in, “It was freezing cold, so I wore mittens.” The temperature caused the need for mittens.

Let’s go back to this man’s use of coordinating conjunctions, understanding that in critical discourse analysis, people’s language is considered revelatory; it reveals their underlying attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs.

I share this mini-analysis to demonstrate how seemingly-insignificant words—just little functional conjunctions in this case—can actually be very telling when studied through the lens of critical discourse analysis.

Put more crassly: This docile-seeming gentlemen, when given a compliment about his docile and well-behaved dog, could have just said “thank you.” Instead, he quite literally called her a bitch. I write this more with humor than as any kind of gigantic social commentary; this is too small a sample from which to draw larger conclusions.

Still, I found it interesting, and I hope some readers may also.

Thank you for reading, Rhetoric Friends!