Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas, Juan van der Hamen, 17th century (Instituto Valencia de Don Juan)
No irregularity, no solecism is too picayune to escape the insolent linguist’s busy beavering, which leads to officious palaver such as this about matters too minute to merit attention from the practical person. Even in the days before I could call myself a “former” linguist the phrase “grammatically correct” was deprecated by a certain scholarly constituency, much as the phrase “politically correct” is deprecated, or at least considered pejorative, by many today.
I tried recently to come to terms privately with what Pee Cee as a term of derision connotes, and worked my way through the following possibilities: complacent elitism, stodgy broadmindedness, stubborn tolerance of differentness, quixotic openness, naive politesse, empty etiquette observance, unexamined adherence to ritual and decorum, senseless sensitivity, queasy avoidance of vitriol and vituperation, overemphasis on the rights of others, obstinate altruism, fact-obsessed truth-seeking in the face of super-obvious opinion, and I don’t remember what else. None of it resolved the paradox of blameworthy correctness for me, so I resolved to simply set the phrase aside for now. I’m happy to do likewise for the Gee Cee phrase.
A photograph appeared in the news of a bartender printing a message on a chalkboard outside his establishment on the Mississippi coast as Hurricane Gordon approached: “Ain’t afraid of no rain.” This is a superbly expressive utterance, entirely correct for its time and place and circumstance. It draws on one of many viable dialects that are alive and well among English speakers. The old “double negative” is much maligned, but renders service that the “proper” expression doesn’t. “I can’t get no satisfaction” was a perfect lyric by the Rolling Stones to communicate young men’s frustration everywhere over lack of “girly action.” I caution my dog Bess every morning not to give way to an inopportune act of elimination in some remote reach of the house before I take her out: “Bess, don’t go do anything anywhere.” As negatives go it’s severely correct for the dialect I use, but “Don’t go do nothing nowhere” would be a linguistically acceptable alternative (though not Gee Cee).
Here’s the specimen that got me thinking about the double negative: The Voice didn’t appear to have a strong sense of identity anymore, in part because the New York that it covered — downtown, the underground, bohemia and its ephemera — didn’t exist anymore, neither in a physical sense nor as a state of mind.
(Tricia Romano, “Last Rites for the Village Voice, a Bohemian Who Stayed On Too Long,” NYTimes, 9-5-18)
I would have written “didn’t exist anymore, *either* in a physical sense *or* as a state of mind.” If the double negative isn’t a lapse, it might be justified as stylistic license to lend greater emphasis. I’m not sure that argument would have great weight in this context, though.
The second specimen that got my attention has nothing to do with the double negative: Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie star in their third season of comedy sketches. At times eccentric, frantic and always unpredictable, Fry and Laurie are a comedic tour-de-force who push the envelope with their brand of smart, irrelevant humour, memorable characters and their fantastic musical numbers.
(Amazon Prime)
I did a double take on “irrelevant.” I’ve enjoyed several seasons of these wonderful sketches, and they’re eminently relevant for me. The person who puffed the series may have intended “irreverent.” It’s a fun slip.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
There Are No “Simple” Truths
https://www.suzannewagner.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/quote…
By labeling what was essentially an opinion as a “truth” I’ve fallen into a hole I try to skirt as much as I can. Better to have said, “I agree” that knowledge is better than ignorance, leaving truth out of it.
My mother was fond of pointing out that Thomas Gray didn’t write “Ignorance is bliss.” He wrote “Where ignorance is bliss, / ‘Tis folly to be wise.” There’s a rider attached to the proposition. I would get no joy from knowing when I’m going to die, for example. On the other hand, where government is concerned, knowledge trumps ignorance in the sense that the fewer secrets kept in high places for no good reason the better. Again, an opinion.
Gun fans compare firearms to pencils: Guns don’t *kill* any more than pencils *misspell*. I question the logic, but maybe it’s apt for knowledge, too: Nuclear physics didn’t build the atomic bomb then drop it on Japan, people did. A verb cropping up in opinion pieces is “weaponize.” It’s used as best I can see to describe the act of turning something that’s neutral or benign, intrinsically not a weapon, into one. This is where the guns-to-pencils analogy gives me pause: A gun, whether used for sport or homicide, is closer to being a weapon than a pencil is. More guns than pencils have been used in combat. However, a pencil, like a hatpin or passenger liner, can literally be “weaponized.”
So can the Internet. Seeking knowledge on the Internet is like supping with the devil — best done with a long spoon. The binary backbone of cyberspace supports much true-false, yes-no, good-bad, we-they, black-white dichotomizing. Seeker beware. Still, I can refresh my grasp of Manichaeism with a quick Wiki-dip, and have done so because as I’ve pondered this post I’ve kept thinking that somehow an allusion to Manichaeism is apposite. Wiki-erudition can be a mile wide and an inch deep, but I wouldn’t want Wikipedia to go away.
The same with Google. It lets a teacher unmask a student’s cannibalized essay text by merely typing a few words from it. That’s a powerful sleuth-tool, though it’s no less vexing that the same tool also facilitates the smash-and-grab plagiarism that teachers have to cope with in the first place.
It feels odd in a way, but also timely, to ask oneself: When does what’s “factual” overlap, if ever, with what’s “true?” Are fact and truth ever synonymous? I suppose the answer depends on whether you ask a scientist, a lawyer, a theologian, or the Internet.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]