I have often read "None of the above" at the end of multiple-choice questions (and I guess this is shorthand for "None of the above items").
Recently, in answering a help center email with my answer on top of the help center’s suggestions, I wrote "none of the below helps me". It struck me as incorrect just after having send it. I guess I should have put "None of the items below".
But it seems to me it is a matter of usage rather than logic : if "the above" is OK, what’s wrong with "the below" ?
Best Answer
Here are some pretty pictures showing that actual usage is indeed extremely "non-symmetrical"...
From which it seems to me any explanation based on the "linearity" of the reading process isn't likely to cut it, since the above/below and preceding/following preferences are exactly opposite.
I'd also mention that (the full) OED has three subdefinitions for above as a noun usage, the oldest dating back to C14. The first citation for the preceding text sense under consideration here is 1691, and appears to be BrE. The second (1708) is definitely BrE, and nowhere does OED suggest this usage is particularly "American".
On the other hand, OED doesn't explicitly recognise below as a noun usage at all. Here are a few hundred written instances of "the below is a list" to show that every now and then someone is tempted to ignore established preference. But here are 54,200 instances of "the above is a list" showing just how strong that preference is.
TL;DR: I don't know why we accept above/following as noun usages, but we're not so keen on below/preceding. Obviously for current usage it's just that most of us simply reflect a strongly established preference that we can't avoid noticing. But to find the original reason for that choice, you'd have to go back over 600 years (well before Gutenberg invented the printing press).