A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."
A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
3 comments:
haha! i love it! i'll have to send this on to my fellow linguists!
--ellen
LOL. Except that a linguist would never say that a double negative is a positive. He or she would mock grammarians who make such prescriptive statements, when English doesn't really work that way--at least not in most dialects.
Sorry.
So true Marion! This was certainly true of most of MY liguistics professors who were by and large DEscriptivists rather than PREscriptivists...but they are still out there, just not at the University of Texas :-)
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