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From: johnper@bigbird.rosemount.com (John Perkins)
Subject: Re: Impaired British Humour (was: Amerikan Kulture (was: MENSA))
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References: <859381151snz@vision25.demon.co.uk> <resch.859401892@cpcug.org> <33399BF6.1672@goldrush.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 00:48:39 GMT
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In article <33399BF6.1672@goldrush.com> mheath@goldrush.com writes:
>Gregory Resch wrote:
>> 
>> phil@vision25.demon.co.uk (Phil Hunt) writes:
>>  > This is not true. Double negatives have always been part of
>>  > English. . . .
>> 
>> I guess Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote pretty rotten English, then,
>> inasmuch as they seem to have avoided double negatives utterly.
>> 
>><...>
>======================================================================
>Said Shakespeare:
>
>"Thou hast spoken no word all this while -- nor understood none
>neither."
>
>"Nor never none shall mistress be of it, save I alone."
>
>Comment from the book cited below:  "The plasticity of Elizabethan
>English is seen too in the prevalence of other usages frowned upon today
>-- for example, the double negative which in Shakespeare's time was
>regarded not as a grammatical crudity but rather as a special form of
>emphasis, a *strong, strong* negative."
>
>Reference:  Lincoln Barnett, _The Treasure of Our Tongue_
>New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964,  p. 162
>
>m.h.

Well, since both of your examples are of *triple* negatives, I hardly think
this disproves the contention that *double* negatives were avoided :-)

John Perkins.
