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:
“My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if in some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.”
—Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966)
“Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.”
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)