“Did they put out the posters again!? I was gone for a day!”
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.
Holy crap, you’ve found four missing pets? That’s pretty damn amazing.
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.
Nah I wouldn’t be surprised. Bastards are smart and assholes.
“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.
If you are ready to reflext on your biases, you should take the 4min and watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3jxC3zqkEE
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.
Prescriptivism in liguistics is for ignorant people.
Ignorance of linguistics is for worthless scum. And I don’t give a flying FUCK (read that again) about anyone elses’ opinion.
Prescriptivism is ignorance. No linguist would take your side in that argument.
You don’t know shit about linguistics.
https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/ThemesAndTopics.aspx?TopicId=25
Edit: oh I see… You don’t know shit about a lot of things… https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/754132/-/comment/4516568
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=o3jxC3zqkEE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You ain’t never learned to just keep that there mouth shut bout how some people make themselves easily understood?
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.
Its true the cat is not formally educated but please don’t call it British.
Yeah I didn’t need to go there. Blimey!
