A positive anymore?

[Beverly Flanigan]

Has Benigno lived in other regions as well as New York?  Positive 'anymore'
is spreading, but it isn't generally in New York State yet, is it?  A
friend of mine from eastern Iowa (faculty brat from U of Iowa) now uses the
structure sometimes, much to my surprise; she's been teaching at Ohio U for
30 years though, and it's very common in much of Ohio (North Midland
creeping northward and southward, though not traditionally South
Midland).  It's also moving into northern Iowa and Minnesota; my
great-nieces have it, but not my siblings and me.  Since this friend is
68-ish and now calls Detroit home, I take note of it when she uses it.  And
of course it came over from various English and Irish usage areas.

At 01:43 PM 10/18/2006, you wrote:
>At 5:12 PM -0400 10/17/06, Wilson Gray wrote:
>> From a review of a shareware app:
>>
>>[T]his is an update from a version 1 to a version 2, yet the
>>developers are not charging for it! That's getting to be pretty rare,
>>_anymore_.
>>
>>There's a certain degree of semantic negation implied in "rare," so
>>I'm not sure that the example counts.
>>
>>-Wilson
>
>It counts, and this would be impossible for pure non-pos-"anymore"
>speakers given the syntactic frame (vs. "It's pretty rare that you'd
>see that sort of thing anymore"), but as you say the "rare" helps;
>the same example with "pretty frequent anymore" would be somewhat
>less likely, as I read you as suggesting.  I just heard my favorite
>pos-"anymore" speaker, Joe Benigno of WFAN whose echt-Noo-Yawkuh
>speech pattern clashes so vividly with those positive "anymore"s he's
>so fond of, produce another one.  Talking about not being able to
>listen to the post-season games on the radio with the favored
>announcers while watching the TV feed with the sound turned down, he
>mentioned the several seconds TV delay that has rendered this
>practice obsolete, and complained,
>
>"That's the way it is anymore".
>
>(This is the same guy who I have on tape saying "Another agita
>special.  The Knicks are a different team from kwawduh duh kwawduh
>anymaw!")
>
>LH
>
>P.S. Note that these examples, while unlicensed by negation, do have
>the negative affect you often find, as e.g. in the famous D. H.
>Lawrence line "Suffering bores me any more".
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org