I guess you can compare grammar and usage from a 1798 poem to a 2006 book, but things have changed a bit over that time span.
They are grammatically incorrect with double negatives when only a single negative is intended. At face value the first one literally means “I have money” but in context most of us know that this is a common ungrammatical usage to mean “I have no money.” We also might know the second means “Don’t go anywhere” if we are used to that ungrammatical usage (or dialect, depending on your school of thought).
In the case of the OP’s quote most people have never seen such a usage, well at least I haven’t. I’m not a literary scholar but I do read a lot and I just didn’t get it.
I really do appreciate all the thought that’s gone into your answers. Much obliged!
(Now that his novel sentence construction has been analysed, maybe I should start a thread on McCarthy’s use of vocabulary. Reading him makes me feel like English is my second language!)
CookingWithGas, the sentences you gave as examples have clear meanings but are grammatically incorrect. The sentence in the OP is grammatically correct. I agree with Gary T that the meaning is: “the snow fell and continued to fall,” but I like the way the original author said it better. The explanation that I gave was just an example of situation in which that sentence would make sense.
You are not the only one who prefers the more common way of saying it.
I’m not sure that anything in this thread establishes that it is correct and there are posts that take the opposite view with some explanation to back it up. I still can’t understand why it is correct to use “nor” in that sentence.
We all know that Catholic grade school nuns are the ultimate arbiters of proper grammar, and they would have taken points off for the OP sentence. The rules I learned would say the sentence is incorrect.
But it turns out the nuns tried to teach me a lot of bullshit, and now that I’m an atheist it may be that the sentence is correct.
I have seen this type of construction in a book published around 1890-1910, where it is repeated several times throughout - its a short historical guide book.
‘The Romance of Old Leeds’ A Mattison & W Meakin.
This book quotes heavily from early 18thC writings of various types, but only the second quotation from the book is actually of this period and the other two seem o have been written in a way to partly mimic the style - or at least give the whole book a coherence without jarring the reader from one period of written language to another.
In other words its a late 19thC idea of what early 18thC writings were like but it is not done anything like as well as the earlier writings, it is, effectively, an attempt at rustication.
I wonder if the rest of the book is written in in manner. I have looked it up on Wiki, and a quote from it suggests this is the case.
One could imagine the reasons behind this manner of writing, it would take the story out of modern speech patterns and reinforce this as a differant time.
Thank you so much for posting that link. That is a really interesting discussion with very well-informed posts on both sides of the issue. I hereby retreat from my intransigent position that the line is flat out incorrect, but I do love the post in that thread by Sid Smith.
I agree with this 100%. The sentence looks assy not because it contains an unusual usage of “nor” (though it does), but because it’s missing the comma. When the comma is inserted, the sense of the archaic usage is awakened:
“The snow fell, nor did it cease to fall.”
This sounds highfalutin, likely as intended, but not jarring. The less-common sense of “nor,” in my opinion, is a red herring in our discussion-- one which I freely admit took me in as well, until duncanmkz struck the scales from my eyes.
I overlooked Frylock’s link because he referred merely to “examples,” nor did I need to see more examples. The link I clicked on was advertised as a discussion. Er.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be snarky (although now, in retrospect, I see how the “er” may have been so construed). My only point was to give credit to Frylock who, in addition to providing the link, may also have been the person who drew the thread to the attention of the good folks at ‘languagelog’ in the first place.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be snarky either. Well, actually, I was trying to be snarky, but I’m sorry I was snarky. Anyway, I give Frylock due credit for being first to bring the thread to light, but my explanation for not clicking on it stands.
Now, for any SAT/ACT students out there, both tests will nail you if you fail to put the “neither” in the sentence, even if the alternate usage seen here is quasi-legal.
