The difference is that you use the "and" only in the case where the last adjective plus the noun are not already a common phrase and thus act as a de facto noun. E.g. "unhealthy and fast food" seems awkward compared to "unhealthy fast food" because "fast food" is a common phrase.

(I never thought about this question till you asked. I just knew I never would have said something so awkward.)

This discussion reminds of the Oxford comma style/grammar debates. Similar situation too: whether to use a comma before the and/or/nor of the last item in a 3+ list. For example: "morning, noon, and night" vs "morning, noon and night".

Offtopic:

I never thought about this until I read your comment and think I would have always chosen "morning, noon and night" as the correct version, but now that I've thought about it, I like "morning, noon, and night" better because I've found the other variant clumsy in certain situations. Sure, those situations are probably signs of badly constructed sentences (eg, nested lists or lists as an aside[1]), but still! The difference is that if I have a list "a,b and c" which is itself followed by a comma "(a,b and c),d" - to me, it looks like "a,(b and c),d" - but if there is a comma before the "and" it doesn't: "(a,b,and c), d" - the "and" now implies that c is the last item of the list, making the nesting obvious.

Just something that popped into my mind just now.

[1] Example: "I find lists which are followed by a comma, such as morning, noon and night, look awkward" vs "I find lists which are followed by a comma, such as morning, noon, and night, look awkward" - the first one reads as if "noon and night" is one item in the list, the second one as two (with night as the final item).

Quotes are not supposed to be paraphrased.

Real people tend not to speak in grammatically correct sentences during conversations. Journalists tend to add words like "and" in quotations where the verbatim quote is not grammatically correct, but the meaning is clear.

In formal writing, the inserted word or phrase is supposed to be enclosed in square brackets to indicate that it is not the original source speaking: "he wanted to go to [the] circus".

The slightly more obnoxious "sic" can be used when you want to leave the grammatical error in, indicating that the error is in the original source: "he wanted to go to circus [sic]".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

A good journalist will adapt their own language to make the unmodified quote fit in where possible. Being misquoted is a sign of sloppy journalism.

"Being misquoted" usually implies that the semantic meaning of what was written is different from what was said. It does not usually mean articles and transitive words were added.

Then it's not a quote.

Have you ever tried to transcribe anything? It's crazy how much garbage comes out with the actual words that form the sentences. Many amazing writers (not to mention linguists) have made their careers developing new written languages to attempt to get a little closer to capturing it, but capturing it is both impossible and an exercise in art, not a sane journalistic practice.

You may not think so, but it's how most "quotes" you read in newspapers and magazines work.

Who reads newspapers or magazines anymore... certainly not me. I expect a quote to be exactly what was said... if someone is correcting the speaker then it's not a quote but a paraphrase. I don't care what the journalist calls it, it's not a quote to me if it isn't exactly what was said.

"pedantic", not to be pedantic

Fixed. Thanks.

And than, not then, to be pedantic.

Well I think there is a major difference, you can be a perpetual grad student but get good stuff done. Usually you end up as a post doc for a while but never get a real prof position for whatever political reason. I know a lot of good grad student that are in school after almost a decade (in grad school).

So the ineffectual part is a major difference.

There also people like me, sticking around universities for a while, using public funds to code cool projects that wouldn't happen anywhere else because it's not something that would be commercializable. I wouldn't call myself ineffectual ;)

I don't think there is a semantic difference, since I would probably transcribe what pg said he said as "ineffectual, perpetual grad student." Note the comma, which implies an "and" relationship between adjectives.

I believe gparent was pointing out that the phrase "ineffectual and perpetual grad student", nuance aside, literally means the same thing as "ineffectual perpetual grad student".

In my mind inserting the 'and' separates the 'ineffectual' and 'perpetual' so it appears the person being described could be a perpetual grad student as an independent idea -- but maybe they just love school life, so it's not really anything negative. Leaving the 'and' out, however, implies to me the person is probably a perpetual grad student because of being ineffectual.

Exactly what I'm thinking. If you remove the and there are two interpretations ( blame english for this). both ineffectual and perpetual or just perpetual or just ineffectual.

Yes, unfortunately no language is an optimum form of communication, so we rely on other cues (often body language when available) to try to determine what an author/speaker really means to convey. Word choice does play a role in that, which is why I think pg (or anybody) would prefer to be quoted correctly :)