The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #102593 Message #2444760
Posted By: Piers Plowman
19-Sep-08 - 03:15 AM
Thread Name: Bazooka Zooka Bubble Gum
Subject: RE: Bazooka Zooka Bubble Gum
Azizi wrote:
"It's interesting to learn that double negatives were an accepted grammatically feature and may still be a grammatically, correct feature of Indo-European languages and other languages, including some African languages."
"Correct" is a problem when talking about language. Who gets to decide? The main object of the study of language is language as its really spoken, not standardized language, though there are people who study other aspects of language, including the latter. For medieval languages, which is what I specialized lo these many years ago, there was no spoken language to study, of course.
One distinguishes between "descriptive" and "prescriptive" grammar. It's relatively easy to make prescriptive rules for a standard version of a language, but it is impossible to make up a set of rules that completely describes a real spoken language. For one thing, one would have to account for regional dialects and even idiolects, i.e., the versions of a language spoken by individual people.
I could go on about this (and on and on), but I need to start work.
I remember Bazooka bubble gum, which I mostly bought for the sake of the little Bazooka Joe comics. I grew up in a northern suburb of Chicago and was born in 1963. I never heard of the song before and don't remember ever seeing or hearing and radio or TV advertising for Bazooka bubble gum. I don't remember if there were billboards, newspaper ads, or anything like that.