10 Years After

The Mystery Of Two

Sleep felt so good last night. Unfortunately, I left the homework for Intro to Linguistics on my desk. (I'll try to swing by and pick it up to drop into the instructor's mailbox when I go to Professional Writing this evening.) Between Intro to Ling and Dialectology I trudged through the rain to the library. I looked up a few grammarian texts to see what they had to say about double negatives/multiple negation for my project in the latter. I didn't find much of interest on the topic.
I came across a 1919 grammar book,Grammar and its Reasons - for students & teachers of the English tongue, by Mary Hall Leonard. What interested me was that the fronstspiece commented that she had been a teacher at some school in New York as well as the Winthrop Normal School in South Carolina. The later school was were my grandmother on my mother's side (I call her Nana) had worked in a variety of positions, including dorm mother ifrom when it was an all female college. In any case, this is what she had to say about double negatives (p.216):

Formerly two negatives were used to make a stronger negative but this was given up under the influence of Latin, in which two bnegatives make an affirmative.
In Old English nay ws used to answer a questions affirmitve in its form , and no a negative one, as
   Is he going?  Nay
   Is he not going?  No.

Also, the book contained an an interesting prescriptive perspective on dialects:

Idiom is more funadamental than dialect and far less local and temporary. Colloquial language is more idiomatic than language of literature. Thus in spoken language, contractins of the negative verb prhrases, as "I can't," "You don't," etc., are constantly used, and are preferred to the unabridged form, but this idiom is excluded for the most part from the language of books.
Slang experssions, if that are of such a nature as to be permanently valuable, may finally become idiomatic, but it takes time for them to become approved and to grow into an idiom. A good idiom is <>old, while good similes and metaphors in language should be new. Most of the slang that is invented is not permanently valuable and never grows into an idiom. There are also various peculiar expressions which we heara nd see, that are not at all idiomatic, but are the result of loose and illogical thinking. Even the native needs a critical and acumen to be able to distinguish always between the idiom of a language which is its strength, and the confusions of loose thougt or doubtful syntax which are the weakness of linguistic expression.
[. . . ]
In dealing with the more peculiar idioms of English, many grammarians make it their effort to explain away all deviations from general grammar and so make it appear that the peculiar phrase is "not much of an idiom" after all. "How shall I dispose of this?" is the common grammatical formula. But to explain away, is not to explain. And why should we "dispose of" our idioms? We ought to try to interpret them. The student of language should face firmly, and deal frankly with, these expressions that puzzle grammarians. Every irregularity arises by deviation from some regularity, and historic grammar will frequently do much to elucidate idiomatic mysteries.
But since one of the most common cuases of irregularity is confusion of thought, the peculiar phrase should be called to "show its credentials." We should draw as clear a line as possible between rue idiom, and loose syntax, or slang which has overstepped right bounds.
The proper grammatical way to treat an idiom then, is to test it - accept it if it is good, and reject it if of doubtful value; also to explain its history if historical grammar reveals such an explanation.
Then, if it really belongs to the genius of the language the way to dispose of of it is to call it by its true name idiom, and let it go.

This view is, of course, something a modern linguists she would seem as totally arbitrary and would not condone.