The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #154300   Message #3620597
Posted By: Lighter
20-Apr-14 - 01:46 PM
Thread Name: BS: English Grandma
Subject: RE: BS: English Grandma
> grouping together what should be grouped.

Exactly. And in an especially long or potentially confusing series, add semicolons where needed.

> No, nay, never
No, nay, never no more

In syntactical terms, that's just one negative expressed six or seven times. It's called "emphasis." The point is that in a case like this, each negative statement is understood by itself, not as part of some grammatical equation that could be *imagined* to contradict itself logically, like "I ain't never done it."

Even a triple negative in English is pretty hard to construct. The Internet example attributed to Groucho Marx is no triple negative at all, because it means *exactly* what it says: "I can't say that I don't disagree with you." It's no more a "triple" than "I don't disagree with you" is a "double."

The test is that a nonstandard double negative means, in a usually forced literal interpretation, the opposite of what everybody would ordinarily understand it to mean:
"You ain't no authority!"

Adding "No way! No how!" would be logically acceptable, because they wouldn't alter the meaning, any more than would "No indeed! Not at all!"