"Save Growlery! The Social Networks Built of Old Words"

[Wilson Gray]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 4:10 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> Good beer makes everything more special, Ms. Thorpe said while
> stocking up for a recent National Football League playoff game. I
> like me some football, but I _don't like me *some* Coors Light_. So I'm
> ensuring I will be happy this afternoon.
>

"_some_"?!!!

Well, I myself was once fully persuaded that simply changing

"Can't _nobody_ …"

into

"Can't _anybody_ …"

produced a standard, prescriptivist-pleasing string. And who knows
exactly what was in the speaker's mind? Maybe she *was* under the
impression that all that was needed was the elimination of the double
negative in order to make everything cool. And it's probably only my
personal background that makes the use of _some_ in place of _no_ in
this structure feel like a harbinger of the end of the English
language as we know it.

Well, given that language probably mutates even more quickly than the
influenza virus, I'm probably indeed seeing a harbinger of the end of
the (standard American-)English language as _I_ know it!

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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