Like isn’t that probable cause saying that you did something?
It’s slang nerd
I’d love to meet slang nerd.
Is he related to the angry video game nerd?
Woah! I’m walkin’ here!
American English has three languages that we do most of our cultural trade with.
- Commonwealth English
- Mexican Spanish
- Franciscan French
In both of the latter, multiple casual negative modifiers are additive instead of inverting. That is, they have the semantics of “bad” instead of “not.”.
Consider :
“i do not not want a million dollars”
and
“That is a bad, bad cookie.”
more common than you think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_negative
different dialects can have different rules about their use
Not everyone is equally educated on grammar. Not everyone cares about using proper grammar.
If you’re asking for a deeper sociological or psychological reason, then grab some books on education disparity, poverty, public schooling, etc.
Grade school grammar is not a proxy for intellect or education. I’ve never read an author who had half the respect for grammar that Chat GPT does.
This occurs in more languages than you think
It’s not ‘people are dumb’ it’s ‘linguistics is dumb’
And surprisingly, people speaking such languages as well as English can learn that each language works differently and use the correct form. (Speaking from personal experience.)
Check Slavic languages for this construct being the correct one.
As a native speaker of a Slavic language, I hate that it works like this. It makes the language less expressive without providing any benefit.
Мне так не кажется.
But then, I am not really fluent in Russian anymore. As is typical in 1st generation Americans, I lost the language as a child.
“Nem csináltam semmit!”
Damn, it works in Hungarian too.
Maybe it’s just English that’s stupid, and not every other language.
It’s a double-negative. Classic grammatical mistake that is sadly quite common in some modern parlance. Blame culture or the education system, but don’t make the mistake of thinking the person saying this is actually trying to slyly indicate they did do something while seeming like they’re denying it. That’s not what’s going on.
Remember: don’t use no double-negatives and don’t never use no triple-negatives!
It’s not a grammatical mistake.
People use language differently than you. Get over it.
FWIW, double negatives have longer been used as a way to add emphasis on the statement than they have been considered “incorrect”.
That’s naïve. One can appreciate differences in grammar usage and take them into account when trying to understand someone else in the context of cultural differences and still acknowledge that grammar has formal rules. If you’re just going to say that grammatical rules can be ignored, why bother teaching grammar at all? Because as much as there might be deviations from the norm, there is still a norm, and it’s important there is one. One cannot appreciate jazz without learning classical musical structures; the existence of jazz does not negate that music has said structures, and jazz wouldn’t be jazz without them.
it’s funny how you say I’m naive and then proceed to insist that your grammar rules are somehow more right than another’s.
While double negatives might be inappropriate in, for example, technical documents; there are a great number of contexts in which they’re quite common and normal. I’m not saying “rules” don’t broadly exist, but rather that they vary from place to place, culture to culture (including Sub and micro-cultures).
Saying that jazz has certain structures is one thing. Same with technical writing. But that ignores the possibility of blues or other folk songs from which jazz evolved out of. Jazz and Blues are not better or more correct than the other.
By the way, you should look into the sorts of people who have historically agreed with you. Classists and racists. For example, Robert Lowth, who argued people sounded dumb, essentially, because it was illogical. Same with many of the grammarians in the US who consistently taught kids that ‘they sound dumb’ because they happen to have a colloquial dialect different than their own.
it’s funny how you say I’m naive and then proceed to insist that your grammar rules are somehow more right than another’s.
Why is that funny? I fail to see how contending that grammatical rules are valid and valuable contradicts with the notion that you claiming “everyone has their own rules, get over it” is naïve. They’re not in contradiction at all.
While double negatives might be inappropriate in, for example, technical documents; there are a great number of contexts in which they’re quite common and normal. I’m not saying “rules” don’t broadly exist, but rather that they vary from place to place, culture to culture (including Sub and micro-cultures).
Nothing I said contradicts that. I simply pointed out that that’s no reason to disregard the rules of grammar.
By the way, you should look into the sorts of people who have historically agreed with you. Classists and racists. For example, Robert Lowth, who argued people sounded dumb, essentially, because it was illogical. Same with many of the grammarians in the US who consistently taught kids that ‘they sound dumb’ because they happen to have a colloquial dialect different than their own.
I made no such racist argument and for you to suggest that I’m racist merely because I pointed out that grammatical rules have purpose and utility simply demonstrates how little you understand the historical context you’re trying to weaponize and how eager you are to slander those who disagree with you as racist. You’re not winning yourself any real points for combatting racism, you’re just exposing yourself as an empty virtue signaler.
Those “rules of grammar” you’re citing have been defined by a very specific class (and frankly, color) of people, and then dictated to students.
Language is functional when it communicates ideas sufficiently from a speaker to their selected audience, and it’s the speaker and their audience who decide that.
With regard to the specific sentence “I didn’t do nothing,”
you wouldn’t have asked this question if you didn’t already know what such a speaker was actually trying to communicate. You just don’t like it, and that’s a you thing.Gah - just realized you’re not OP. My previous paragraph still generally stands.
No, your entire comment is in general ignorance of my point, which I’ve articulated enough times by now that I’m not going to do it again. Y’all can hide behind cultural differences as much as you want. Grammatical rules still exist and pointing that out isn’t racist. Grow the fuck up, I’m out.
I made no such racist argument and for you to suggest that I’m racist merely because I pointed out that grammatical rules have purpose and utility simply demonstrates how little you understand the historical context you’re trying to weaponize and how eager you are to slander those who disagree with you as racist. You’re not winning yourself any real points for combatting racism, you’re just exposing yourself as an empty virtue signaler.
First off. lets look at people who have, historically espoused the idea that double negatives are “illogical” and "ungrammatical.
Robert Lowth, for example, was a Bishop of Oxford; and leader in the Church of England. Raging classist. who liked to cite the use of double negatives as a reason for why commoners were stupid.
Lindley Murray, He was a Quaker, a Lawyer, and Loyalist during the American revolution whose loyalties were likely tied to protecting his wealth, which came from his father’s shipping company. His prescriptive rules as for English Grammar was oft cited as an example of “poor” education, and his rules were focused on emulating “the best writers”… which were universally rich nobles. Murray’s rules were not based on common use, but rather the use by a specific subset of predominately white elites.
Both Murray and Lowth were members of those elites, and contributed significantly to perceptions that not speaking as they had was a sign of poor education and poor upbringing. They believed it was so largely because that’s how they themselves spoke and wrote . That perception was taken to it’s extreme in defending slavery, arguing that, for example, slaves and their descendants were inferior- or inhuman- because of how they spoke.
I cannot say if you are racist. I don’t know you. I can say, however, that the most-often cited proponents of double negatives being bad grammar were straight up assholes. I generally assume that most people don’t know that. But that brings me back to what I’ve been trying to say this entire time: Prescriptive Grammar assumes that a specific way of speaking or writing is somehow correct, and all others are, if not outright wrong, then inferior. And that is blatantly untrue.
LOL, keep imagining demons, man. What a sad home for pearl-clutching recemongers Lemmy is.
I think you have this back to front. The grammar rules were written long after the language was spoken. Their purpose is to describe how language is actually used. Language evolves, though, so grammar must evolve too.
I think you and many other people in this thread have this ass to mouth and don’t know which end is which.
Double-Negatives sound pointlessly made up. The more I look into about them, the more I just think how pointless it is.
Double negatives are an integral part of UK English. Without them we might be forced to say something directly, which just wouldn’t be on.
That’s a different kind of double negative, isn’t it?
What do you find pointless about them?
They provide no benefit for comprehension while making it impossible to express actual double negation.
Pshhhh!!! You need to learn your proper 90s ebonics. The proper way “Maaaaan! I aint done nothin!”
This was actually taught properly in at least one state funded college in 1999. I remember vividly laughing at how stupid our future looked.
Now, 25 years later, can confirm. The future is dumb.
Actually…
“I didn’t do nothin’!”
Say it like you’re from New Jersey
There are languages (e.g. Spanish) where a double negative is still understood as a negative.
Standard varieties of English aren’t among them, but some dialects are.
The same is also true in German.
How would that work in German? I’m trying to figure it out, but can’t come up with anything
in some Austrian/Bavarian dialects people say things like “i hob koa Gööd ned” which translated word-for-word to Standard German is “ich habe kein Geld nicht”.
Oh sure! I’ve heard that before, I wouldn’t say it’s common though. Thanks for expanding!
Even in Spanish, some double negatives are underestood as negatives, like “I didn’t do anything” (yo no hice nada)
