[Ads-l] Fwd: On National Grammar Day, stop acting like the earth is flat

[Laurence Horn]

Nice post, Dennis--but methinks you may have been spending too much time watching the political "debates" and thereby learning how to conceal inconvenient truths.  As I'm sure you know (you may have mentioned it in your _Grammar and Good Taste_), your reasonable, non-prescriptivist icon Bishop Lowth from this post was also the main authority in insisting that "Two negative in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative" (1762: 126) and did as much as anyone to establish as irrefutable the bromide that what we now call negative concord is illogical and incorrect.  

LH

> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: "Baron, Dennis E" <debaron at ILLINOIS.EDU>
> Subject: On National Grammar Day, stop acting like the earth is flat
> Date: March 3, 2016 at 11:59:24 PM EST
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> 
> There’s a new post on the Web of Language:
> 
> On National Grammar Day, stop acting like the earth is flat
> 
> 
> March 4th is National Grammar Day, time to remember that language, like the earth, IS NOT FLAT.
> 
> On National Grammar Day, it’s traditional to pick up a red marker and go forth (it’s March 4th, get it?) to correct other people’s grammar, deleting those unnecessary apostrophe’s and turning ‘10 items or less’ into ‘fewer’ at the grocery checkout. But that would be wrong. Because language, like the earth, is not flat.
> 
> Read the full post on the Web of Language: https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__bit.ly_1nkuNqO&d=AwIGaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=8Ec0Lp-05vG9dSPUuU1EJok1b6XHM-vvRXY9Gez7Rg0&s=KZBOul6OXD6tM-NvNf-bApwiSyRIftj69RItBGbnJCI&e= 
> 
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__www.americandialect.org&d=AwIGaQ&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=8Ec0Lp-05vG9dSPUuU1EJok1b6XHM-vvRXY9Gez7Rg0&s=ICg7YS41wG2x-90mlEK_bc169uz8G8IACgvJbH3hBsA&e= 

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