positive "anymore" trivia

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Just to be clear, it's the fronting of 'anymore' that's marking this as non-standard since the verb is negative, right? As a positive anymore user myself, my intuitions are messed up on this count.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Laurence Horn
Sent: Mon 3/20/2006 7:58 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      positive "anymore" trivia
 
So I was listening to a Rita Coolidge CD called "Out of the Blues",
mostly standards like "Mean to Me", "Am I Blue?", "Stormy Monday",
"Bring It On Home to Me", "The Man I Love", and so on, when a song
came on that I wasn't familiar with, which begins

Anymore it doesn't matter who's right or wrong.
We've been injurin' each other much too long.
And it's too late to try to save what might have been.
It's over; nobody wins.

This struck me as very peculiar, almost a register clash in the
context, but I see now that unlike the other selections written by
Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Ira Gershwin, et al. this was penned by Kris
Kristofferson (not surprising in itself, since I still think of Rita
Coolidge in the context of /Kris Kristofferson and ____).  So
checking his bio, he was born in rural Texas and moved around a lot
before settling in Nashville, so he must have come by his positive
"anymore" honestly enough.  Still, I wonder what the various artists
who have covered the song, apparently ranging from Sinatra to Elton
John, have thought about that first line...

larry

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org