in all of my years living in NYC, this has happened on no fewer than 4 occasions— seeing aa missing pet sign and then looking over to see that pet just sitting there or walking around nearby. yes, I called the owners.
Found feels like a stretch, seems like NY cats have worked out that those poles are a taxi service just for them, so they just look for their pole and wait till their chauffeur to arrive.
"You ain't saw nothing," I'm still trying to figure out what that sentence means. It's sort like something an uneducated thug in britain might say, in a novel. I think what it means is "you didn't see anything." But since it's a double negative, it implies you actually did see something. Very strange!!
Not so strange actually. Sure, seen superficially, it seems that double negatives negate each other but that doesn’t fit the empirical data. Many languages do this in their standard variety and English does it in many local, social and historical varieties. I think Shakespeare did it too.
Spanish for example has “sin nada”, literally “without nothing” but meaning “with nothing”/ “without anything”.
So the linguistic consensus is that the negative is expressed more than once. Depending on the language this might be optional or not. Slavic languages have a negative prefix “ne-” on verbs and this is obligatory if a negative word (like never, nobody,…) is used in the sentence.
In English a negative expressed more than once is commonly called a double-negative and also thought to mean the opposite of what the sentence says. It trips me up to read awkward sentences like that, I find it's sort of like a road bump where you don't expect one. But I do realize that it often appears normally in other languages that way.
I’m pretty sure you say and hear “I don’t have anything” all the time and it doesn’t trip you up. That’s a double negative used in common dialects of English to emphasize.
Arguably, since “anything” is only used in negative sentences, it is kind of part of the negative. You wouldn’t say “I have anything”, only “I don’t have anything”. Then again, it can be used in positive sentences like “I would do anything” with a slightly different meaning.
But let’s take “anymore”. “I can’t stand it anymore” is a common phrase but “I can stand it anymore” not so much. “anymore” is only used in negative sentences so the “not” is arguably redundant and therefore “not … anymore” is kind of a double negative.
And even that’s not true for all speakers of English. There are native speakers who would say “I go to town anymore” unironically.
Edit: I reread the comment you reacted to and to say it’s “to emphasize” is wrong. That argument would work better for “at all” for example. My point is that “double negative” isn’t as clear cut as it might seem to be at first glance. “I don’t know nothing” is a double negative for sure, “I don’t know anything at all” kind of in a way, “I don’t know anything” maybe a little bit.
First of all, something like “I’ll have anything” is a valid and reasonable statement that is not negative, for example when somebody asks you what you want to drink.
But further, “anything”, “anymore” and “at all” are all very different - from what I understand, “anymore” doesn’t even exist as a word in British English, and I’d point out an example of “do you have any more?” as another non-negative. I think generally “anything” makes more sense by itself than “anymore”/“any more”, and “at all” similarly needs context. But just to provide a not-really-negative example, “Do you like it at all?”, where a positive response (“yes”/“I do”) does mean liking something.
In the end, I think your arguments might be stemming from trying to apply the term to too many things, from my understanding double negatives are very simple in that they need to have two negatives. A word being general, and used mostly in negative statements doesn’t mean it’s a negative, and that the actual negative part of the sentence is redundant.
All of us have biases, but it's wrong to excuse bad grammar as being some kind of "normal." If people can't handle constructive criticism, they shouldn't be submitting stuff to online sites to start with.
Tbh prescriptivism has its place in official over regional communication and language learning. We wouldn’t understand each other if we were writing each in their local dialect and when you start learning a language, you don’t want to first need an overview of the dialect continuum.
That said, in unofficial writing it doesn’t matter as long as you write intelligible and advanced language learners should learn about varieties. I for example was tought British English at the start and in the 4th year, we learned about American English and the differences to British English.
If that kind of twisted and illogical grammar is what you call "easily understood," then I'm beginning to see why we have such a literacy problem. My whole point is that it is NOT easily understood, and in fact I've rarely encountered a more difficultly worded sentence when all the person was trying to say was simply "you didn't see anything." See how easily it can be said AND understood?
Consider that English grammar in general feels like that for everybody whose first language has synthetic grammar (like Slavic languages).
A-and for me it seemed funny and it’s amazing how there are so many dialects of English. It’s really boring to speak a language which is more or less the same everywhere it’s present.
