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:
“Chaucer’s remarkably trustful and affectionate character appears in his familiar, yet innocent and reverent, manner of speaking of his God. He comes into his thought without any false reverence, and with no more parade than the zephyr to his ear.... There is less love and simple, practical trust in Shakespeare and Milton. How rarely in our English tongue do we find expressed any affection for God! Herbert almost alone expresses it, “Ah, my dear God!””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they
have a good thing, to make it too common.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.”
—Thomas Beecham (1879–1961)