And my response is language is not math. I grew up with aspects of negative agreement in Polish. One says “nie mam nic” or, in Hungarian, “nincs semmim,” both literally meaning “I don’t have nothing.” I know that English is not these languages, but the idea is that negative agreement is evidenced in other language and is a perfectly logical way, too, of approaching negatives. And it’s unsurprising that some dialects of English treat negation this way, as it’s a perfectly natural way of doing so.
Plus “I can’t get any satisfaction” would have sounded stupid. Thank God the artists don’t care.
If you’re doing technical work, of course, be precise. Have a style guide. Stick to it. If you’re doing a colloquial English on-field interview, it’s rather silly, IMHO, to “correct” the person being interviewed.
Alice, Bill, Carlos, and Danielle are having a conversation.
Alice says, “It’s been a minute since I’ve seen y’all!” Bill and Carlos agree. Danielle corrects her, pointing out that it’s been much longer than sixty seconds.
Bill says, “I literally slaughtered my opponent in that game!” Alice and Carlos cheer him on. Danielle calls the cops to report a murder.
Carlos says, “If you’re hungry, there’s a sandwich in the fridge.” Alice and Bill thank him for the information. Danielle asks whether there’s a sandwich in the fridge if she isn’t hungry.
Alice, Bill, and Carlos are good at language. Danielle sucks at language. Alice, Bill, and Carlos are successfully using language to move ideas from one brain to the other. Danielle is caught up in superstitious ideas about how language works and is failing to understand the ideas of others due to her superstitions.
Danielle leaves the situation thinking that she’s the only one who speaks proper English. She’s wrong.
It helps to realize that nearly EVERY WORD we say is, or was, a metaphorical extension. Surely, on the steppes around 4000 BC, some Proto-Indo-Europeans were complaining about the young folks messing up the language by, say, using “head” of cattle to mean “individual”, or “understand” to mean “comprehend” when no one is standing under anything (I think the latter example is from later Proto-Germanic, but you get the idea).
This book is great*:
*Well, it’s only about six by eight inches…see what I mean?
There’s a difference between, on one hand, understanding the actual meaning of metaphoric or colloquial language but being annoyed at its usage, and on the other hand, taking that language, well, literally. Danielle sounds like she’s at the farther end of the autism scale
I’m following the exaggerations of folks above, folks who have denigrated Alice, Bill, and Carlos in almost exactly the ways I had Danielle denigrate them.
But you’re right: there’s a big difference between being annoyed and taking language literally. Still, if the only thing Danielle does is to be annoyed by Alice, Bill, and Carlos, she’s still worse at language than they are. She is fulfilling her part of the communication bargain–the comprehension part–worse than they are, letting herself be distracted by her superstitious ideas about language.
I really don’t understand what you are trying to say what that example. “One of a kind” does not mean “one of something that there are lots of.” It means the exact opposite. That’s not a colloquial meaning, that’s the meaning. That is the only way that phrase is ever used. The one thing is not like any other kind, it’s its own kind.
I’d prefer a simpler “An’t I”, pronounced like the bug. According to one person “Aren’t I” evolved from “Amn’t I” being pronounced as “Ahn’t” I, and from there we got the intrusive ‘r’. However, “Amn’t I” is used in Scotland and Ireland, and apparently they don’t have any issues with it.
I will admit that I do sometimes respond to a sentence like “If you’re hungry, there’s a sandwich in the fridge,” by saying “And what if I’m not hungry? Does the sandwich not exist?”
Thanks — that sounds very plausible.
Yes, some dialects accept consonant clusters that others do not. Black English typically eschews “sks” (as in “asks”) and “lm” (as in “elm”) in certain linguistic contexts, for example.
But how would you describe one thing that is like a bunch of other things, which are — as it happens — all of the same kind?
If you show me something that I believe is the only one of its kind, and then you surprise the heck out of me by showing me ten more things that are of the same kind, then I’d say, “oh, gosh; I thought it was the only one of its kind, but now I see that it’s not; each of those is of the same kind, and so this is one of the same kind!”
When language is used to describe logical propositions, its structures are, in fact, much like math. No one who has written computer programs in high-level languages, or written scientific papers or technical documents, would argue that precision in language doesn’t matter. Since I’ve done a lot of all of those things, I’m probably more fastidious than most about precision in language. I have no problem with colloquialisms and all kinds of informal speech in informal contexts; I have no problem with “if you’re hungry there’s a sandwich”; but I do get annoyed when logic itself is stood on its head and thrown out the window.
“I don’t have no regrets” is one example of such an abomination. It’s clearly saying that I lack the entity {no regrets}, and the only way this is possible is if I do, in fact, have one or more regrets. The same criticism applies to the gratuitous use of “literally” when there is no metaphor there to intensify. Or to the expression “I could care less” where in that case a necessary negative has gone missing in action.
Let’s revisit for a moment the double negatives in French. In English I could say to someone “you don’t know anything”, or I could say “you know nothing” which has the same meaning but a somewhat different tone. In French, because of the double negatives strewn willy-nilly all over the place, there is simply no way to express that second variant. English is said to have a lexicon of from about 200,000 to as many as 500,000 words, depending on how you count them. French has fewer than 100,000. As much as francophones may love their language, English IMHO is more richly expressive, and it’s certainly more logical in how it treats negation.
Not just silly, but unacceptably rude. Has anyone here suggested that someone IRL making grammatical mistakes should be “corrected”? I sure haven’t. I will speak up and ask questions if I genuinely don’t understand them, though, and that’s much more likely to happen with sloppy language.
I love you, wolfpup, but this is absolutely incorrect.
About seven billion people speak about five thousand languages in which negative particles or their semantic equivalents intensify each other — they don’t negate each other, like matter and antimatter.
True, for some (not all) constructions, standard US English isn’t one of those languages…but the tendency is far from inherently illogical, and that’s why so many dialects — and even casual speech in the standard one — tend to use it in the way you detest.
(Even English used to have an equivalent to French’s “ne (verb) pas,” by the way).
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently - I reckon English, to native speakers, is a language where the meaning is a seemingly separate thread of implied concepts that is parallel to, but only tenuously linked to the spoken/written part.
