While I agree with the above, it is also true that using a double negative as an intensifier is going to sound uneducated to a lot of people, and that saying things like “We don’t need no education” may cause them to think that one does in fact need more education. Schools are generally expected to teach children how to write/speak a standard dialect.
However, I think this choice of phrasing was a deliberate rejection of “proper” English on Roger Waters’ part. The point of “Another Brick in the Wall Part II” isn’t that the kids “don’t need no education” because they already know everything, but rather that the education system is unnecessarily controlling and brutal. While “don’t need no” may not be standard English, that doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for a teacher to beat or mock a student for using double negatives or that it’s wrong to use double negatives in informal speech/writing. So I’m coming down on the side of “We don’t need no education” being somewhat ironic but not factually inaccurate.
Thus the classic bar-bet question *"If you’re standing in downtown Detroit, and start walking due south, what’s the first foreign country you reach? * Of course, I’d bet that you’re more likely to reach the undiscovered country, first.
England is a nation that makes up per of the UK, thus England still exists, and ERII is Queen of that area, and in fact the entire island. Like I said, she’s also Queen of London. Or Shropshire.
True, she does not style herself Queen of Shropshire since that is included in England which is included in the UK.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a ballad; ballads are never inaccurate. They are romantic legends.
In The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia, just because the guy fired his gun to flag down the Staties doesn’t mean they would be the first ones to show up. Nothing else went right for the poor guy that night.
(I have always wondered why a recently married man would have stopped for a beer after being gone for two weeks; if I’d been his ‘young bride’, I would have been checking out Seth Ames, too.)
No, because the entire concept of “proper grammar” is that is that it’s how you speak in formal English. The fact that people often do it differently in another style has jack all to do with it. This isn’t one of those constructions that was accepted in formal English until someone made up a rule that it shouldn’t. It’s always been considered wrong because it’s confusing, and formal English is, among other things, about removing ambiguities like that.
In the Monty Python “Universe/Galaxy Song,” it says our planet is *revolving *at 900 mph. The Earth rotates on its axis at roughly 900 mph (more like 1,000 mph); it revolves around the Sun at 66,000 mph.
The song Lowlife by Theory Of a Dead Man has the line “I’ve got an '82 Fiero with a car seat in the middle broken down on the interstate”. Not possible- Fieros were built '84-'88.
In Ridin’ the Storm Out by REO Speedwagon, how can the singer see the full moon crossing the range when he’s riding out a storm?
He says he’s waiting for the thaw out, so it seems that the snow has fallen and now they’re snowed in, riding out the storm’s effects. On a full moon night, watching the moon go by, because they are snowed in.
Actually, San Francisco was founded in 1776 by Spanish colonists maintaining a fort and a mission, but it only had around a thousand people in it until the Gold Rush; that’s when it really took off. Starship/Jefferson Airplane got into the game pretty late, IMHO.
“I will be your knight in shining armour
Riding across the desert on a fine Arab charger”
I doubt an Arabian horse could carry a knight in armor, and if it could it wouldn’t be charging. I don’t know how long someone would last wearing armor in the desert before they dropped over from heatstroke.
