File under “Cannot Can Not”: Cannot is not necessarily one word; or, cannot isnot necessarily one word, and probably shouldnot be.
I can not deny the flow of identical consonants in the compound verb cannot. I also concede some fairly subtle potential differences
in the elocutions: saying “You can not go” might mean, “You have the choice not to go” (though when spoken by my wife, it means 1 have no choice—yeah, I’m going), while “You cannot go” clearly means the only choice is staying. And then there’s the matter of speaking the word(s) aloud: placing a space between the two syllables introduces something of a ghost stutter when articulating the n twice. Yet, this joining—with no other precedent I can find (until I get that snarky letter from one of you kind folks)—is noticeably inconsistent with the other verb-nots (and you know from my comments on these pages that I am a consistency militant, though inconsistently so). As we’ve seen in the introduction to this section, isnot doesnot work (nor does doesnot), and shouldnot doesnot work, as well. Add to the list the other have-nots: willnot, shallnot, amnot, donot, doesnot, maynot, mustnot, astronot (just kidding).
But I amnot kidding about couldnot. If using cannot vs. can not is so important in distinguishing the meanings of “You are unable to go” and “You are able to opt not to go,” then why don’t those who insist on this distinction apply the same logic to could not?
“You could not go” can mean “You could choose to not go,” and in fact I submit that using could when expressing such option is far more common than using can. If a teenager said, “I just scratched the car—what will I tell my dad?,” his pal is more likely to reply, “Well, you could not tell him” than he would “You can not tell him.” Given that greater usage, wouldn’t those who insist on cannot even more vigorously call for bringing the nonexistent couldnot into the language?
Now, if it weren’t for the fact that cannot has been in use since around the thirteenth century, I’d suggest that perhaps the conjoining of syllables is a conservationist effort, seeking to avoid
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Bill Brohaugh
expending unnecessary spaces out into, well, out into space. In this light, eschewing can not in favor of cannot could be viewed as a matter of wastenotwantnot.