a joke about two pere ubuists

[Abdiel OAbdiel]

--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There's a story about someone presenting a paper on
> linguistics and making the point that whereas, two
> negatives can be used to create a positive or to
> create an emphatic negative, there was no example in
> language where two positives were used to create a
> negative.
> 
> To which someone in the audience responded, "Yeah,
> yeah."
> 
> As to Mr. OAbdiel, who seems to believe all usage
> different but equal, I wonder how he'd feel in court
> if his lawyer pled to the judge that-- 
> 
> "Poor Abdiel, he no have no way to get home,
> meeahmore." 


 

In Chaucer's and Shakespeare's English, double
negative words like NOT, NO, or NEVER, reinforce each
other in the same sentence. In modern English, this
duplication is considered nonstandard. 

Every language is a composite of dialects. Some people
believe languages are well defined and fixed systems
with various dialects diverging from this norm.  These
folks tend to be prescriptive rather than descriptive
grammarians. Prescriptive grammarians usually consider
the dialect used by politicians, business leaders, the
upper socioeconomic class, the dialect used for
literature and printed documents, the dialect taught
in schools and used in courts, and propagated by the
mass media, as the "correct" form of language. These
so-called "language purists" have no support for their
claim other than political one. Standard American
English is an ideal. Nobody speaks this dialect, and
if somebody did, we wouldn't know it because the ideal
(SAE) is not defined precisely. 


To answer your question, if my lawyer addressed the
court with that phrase I would fire her. 

No, NO, really, I would. 



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