Double Negative - English

English

In standard written English, when two negatives are used in one sentence, the negatives are understood to cancel one another and produce a weakened affirmative. However, in many dialects, the second negative is employed as an intensifier and should be understood as strengthening the negation rather than removing it.

Read more about this topic:  Double Negative

Famous quotes containing the word english:

    I’ve sometimes thought ... that the difference between us and the English is that the Scotch are hard in all other respects but soft with women, and the English are hard with women but soft in all other respects.
    —J.M. (James Matthew)

    His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.
    —Seventeenth-century English proverb, collected in Outlandish Proverbs, George Herbert (1640)