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Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr): let the world I knew become the space between the words that I had by heart and all the other speech that always was...
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Ain’t that how everybody talks
I enjoyed this exchange on the use of ain’t in Annie Proulx’s story ‘The Mud Below’, from her fine collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Diamond, a young rodeo bullrider, is visiting his home and...
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Multiple negation and the meaning of ‘grammar’
I have two more posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. (Yes, I mentioned a prior couple just a week ago – I wasn’t keeping up!) First: Grammar at cross purposes highlights a common source of...
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Litotes and lyrics on which we disagree on
Following my recent defence of double negatives, I wrote further about a particular form of multiple negation that has been popular for many centuries. In Litotes is no small matter, at Macmillan...
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‘The nicest no I ever heard’
In Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999) is the transcript of an interview conducted under the auspices of the AAAS, in which Feynman recalls his very first formal lecture. As an...
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Pelecanos: the words, the rhythms, the slang
I’m slowly catching up on the back catalogue of George Pelecanos, who has written about 20 crime fiction novels (and also wrote for The Wire). Recently I read Hell to Pay (2002), which contains several...
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Misnegation should not be overestimated, I mean underestimated
Misnegation is an obscure word for a common phenomenon. You won’t find it in dictionaries, but you can probably figure out that it means some kind of ‘incorrect negation’ – not to be confused with...
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