ENGLISH MATH

Who sent me this in December?

There is no "double positive" in English.

Yeah, right.

Of course we learned in school that a double negative in English makes a positive:

"Don't you have any money for a tip?"

"Well, I don't have no money, but I only have a quarter."

This is the mathematical logic of English. In other languages, of course, the double negative simply emphasizes the negative, which is what is usually intended by people who use it (incorrectly) in English. It's a bad idea to cast sentences in the negative, with more than one negative, if you can avoid it. It often leads to confusion. A negative repeated more than twice is clearly for emphasis: "Never never never never never" does not produce a positive, but neither does "Never never never never".

George Orwell explained this well in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", using an example from a Professor Harold Laski:

I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Orwell says Laski "uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage."

But Churchill used the multi-negative well.

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never, in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

~ Winston Churchill 10/29/41

ONE OF MY MORNINGS

What to do at 5:00 in the morning when you can't sleep: Go to Found, the web site that publishes funky little scraps people find. Here's a note somebody found that has a great example of a dangling modifier:

M/M Harvey,

I broke your light fixture when I dropped your package off with my big head. My name is Ed

Please let me know what it cost to replace.

Sorry, Mailman

The question is, of course, did Mailman Ed use his head to drop the package, or did the package contain his head?

MORE SCRAPS

Gary H. (aka Fresh) liked the Hoolihan song, which inspired him to send his own scrap:

When talking about a little nothing country town, called Higbee, Missouri, one local Huntsville, Missouri boy, with a real cowboy lifestyle, voice and vibe, said, "They ought'a put a chain link fence around it, and feed 'em scraps."

And Dea sent this about the song: I learned to sing "I Ride an Old Paint" from Pete Seeger who told me that an old dan is a cowboy's mutt. But "I lead an old dan" sounds like he's taking the dog for a drag, Fred says. So maybe the original lyric really was "old dam", meaning an old mare. Or what about "an old dun", meaning a tan colored horse? It's way cool that Dea learned something about music from Pete Seeger, but he could tell Pete that cowboys usually don't lead dogs from horseback; the dog trots alongside. Similarly, I've sometimes thought the song "The Old Gray Mare" might have originally been "The Old Dray Mare", meaning the old draught horse, but I have no evidence for it.

WRITING AND REWRITING HISTORY

Mike Sykes sent this about how Wikipedia gets used and abused:

This has almost certainly come to your notice, but just in case: Rewriting History Under the Dome

and, for the history, Marty Meehan / Wikipedia.

While one has to be careful what one believes, I'm convinced there are enough honest people trying hard to uphold the sound principles on which Wikipedia is based that breaches of these principles won't go uncorrected for long.

TO F***ING ERR IS HUMAN

Bill R., an old school chum of Dave DaBee's, sent this anecdote from Dave's colorful academic career:

deBronk may recall an incident in which several froshpersons were talking in the dorm lounge. Saud al-Sowayl, then a junior, burst in, grabbed deB, and said ..., "You split a f***ing infinitive! To split a f***ing infinitive is to f***ing err!"

Of course Dave recalled, and said Saud was connected to the royal (Saudi) family, but preferred to live in the dorm, and liked to do vaudeville jokes with a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Where is he now when we need him?

Dave also sent this: "Stewardesses" is the longest word typed with only the left hand and "lollipop" with your right, and here's a sample sentence: Stewardess Teresa gave people lollipops as Polly & Milly (in mink) raced east. Each word in this sentence is typed with just one hand, although the ampersand kind of spoils it, and Fred noticed that the S on lollipops totally spoils it. This is not useful information, but it does remind me of my typing classes in high school. I started mentally typing everything, and I'd try to find words that are typed with alternate fingers, etc. This is what comes of being a bit compulsive and having too much time on one's hands.

HARDY vs. HEARTY

Somewhere I read that Ariel Sharon had "a hardy appetite". If I'd heard it, I wouldn't have noticed the mistake, because the words sound alike, but the meanings are just close enough to be confusing in writing. Hardy means strong, tough. Hearty can mean strong too. But while we may speak of a vigorous appetite, we usually don't speak of an appetite that can endure a lot. I suppose people who eat a lot of bad food, like the guy in Supersize Me who ate exclusively at McDonald's for a month, could be considered hardy. More like foolhardy. He wasn't very well by the end of the month, therefore he wasn't truly hardy. (Note: I eat at McDonald's, but not that much.)

The expression "party hearty" has been confusing to more than me. A blogger named Ann Althouse discusses the party problem.

DEFAULT SETTINGS

Recorded music by black artists used to be called "race records" ~ as if they were a race and white people were not. When you talked about race, only one was meant. Feminists have written about the assumption that the generic "he" of literature supposedly meant all humans, though you'd have to infer that from context; it wasn't always true. But in nineteenth century writing, the phrase "the sex" was used to refer to the female sex. I can't recall any examples, but I did come across this bit of academic writing which illustrates this usage:

' "The Sex" Debates. The Suffrage Campaign in 1889', New Women Hybridities, ed. Ann Heilmann. Routledge, 2004, 51-73.

Note that "The Sex" is separated as a phrase from "Debates", showing that the debates were about "the sex", not about "sex".

SCIENTISTS AWAITIN'

TV newscast: "Scientists are anxiously awaiting to examine ..."

"Awaiting" must be followed by a noun, not an infinitive. It should have been "waiting to examine", but one "awaits results", for example.

"Awaiting" followed by an infinitive sounds like a non-standard pronunciation, or maybe a sort of hillbilly construction (meaning an old English form with the prefix a-), as in "Time's awastin'!", as Snuffy Smith used to say. (I'm stunned to find that the cartoon Snuffy Smith is still being drawn and published.)

I found a similar example in a poem called "Walking Rifleman". I'm sure you could find lots more by searching words like "ahopin' " and "aworkin' " and ... well, just try it.

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