Every time I mow the lawn I think of this

Your choice: Avoid Serious Injury or Death -- but not both!

If you've done even a little computer programming, you should already know what I'm going to tell you about AND and OR. If we're talking about two things, like "serious injury" and "death", and we say "serious injury and death" we mean BOTH of those things. But if we say "serious injury or death", we mean just one of them, one or the other. That's what the words "and" and "or" do.

So when the sticker on your lawn mower says avoid serious injury "or" death, they are saying PICK THE ONE YOU WANT TO AVOID.

If they want you to avoid BOTH serious injury AND death, then they should say "avoid serious injury and death".

Does it matter? Not if you're dead, I guess.

It matters to me, because I want to take something that somebody said and evaluate it. The guy said

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, or buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

Notice the word "or" in that sentence. The word "or" means that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." Of course, if any one of them is a problem, then all three of them together are a problem, sure.

But if the guy specifically meant to say that the combination of all three together is the problem, then he needed to use "and" rather than "or" in that sentence:

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, and buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

In this case, the sentence means (or could mean) it's a problem when all three things happen, but not if only one of them happens, or two out of three.

Because the guy used the word "or", I take him to mean that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." And I want to argue against that, because it's not always true and the exception is an important one.

But I'm not sure he really meant that any one of the three is a problem, because maybe he used "or" when he should have used "and". It is a common mistake.

But it would sure be a pity if the economy went bad because somebody said "or".