Bored now!

Ponygurl said:

^ That's slang from "our" era...now it's "TURN UP" ...I have no idea why. It makes me think of a disgusting root vegetable.

I found this from a Pitbull song, ft Jennifer Lopez: "turn up this mother and let it play." I presume it refers to the music. Dreadfully uninventive!

^Haha! No, that's still "our" era. Think of Juicy J and Miley Cyrus..(but don't give yourself nightmares)

Got to get this thread back on track. Here's a West Yorkshire (or more pricisely Leeds) phrase worth re-introducing into common parlance. See if you can get into a conversation today!
'Well I'll go 't foot of our stairs' an exclamation of surprise.

iuventus said:

Urban_Tribesman said:

A real life quadruple negative, and it doesn't sound course at all!

That's an example of triple negation, and Sheldon uses it to exemplify the prescriptive rule of multiple negation in a particularly erudite fashion. The type of multiple negation people tend to scoff at is that which does not intend to exploit that very rule for elevated humor or wit.

It's not particularly helpful to compare Elizabethan English to 21st Century Modern English with hope of polishing one's own generic grammar skills or of correcting or defending one's dialect or idiolect. Not only are many of our presumptions about Shakespeare's intention...well, presumptuous, but the language, itself, has evolved--for better or worse--too far to use Early Modern English as an appropriate model. Also, Shakespeare's English was a particularly affected example of the written language--though it was, indeed, meant to be heard rather than read.

Now you mention it, when I read this, I could only see 3 negatives but it is all over the web that this is an example of quadruple negation and who am I to argue. Even Amy herself at the end of the quote says 'now repeat it without the quadruple negative'. Ah ha. I was bought up to believe the Tv and newspapers were never wrong, always told you the truth and you could bet your life on the information in Wikipedia!

Further to this, and with more digging, it seems as though there is feeling on the web that 'I object' is a negative, if only in intent by Sheldon. So put with the two 'nots' and the 'no' in this sentence, that is how it is being interpreted as a quadruple negation. Interesting article on this very statement on linguistrix.com from 18th Nov, 2011.
I think everyone else has gone to sleep!

Urban_Tribesman said:

Further to this, and with more digging, it seems as though there is feeling on the web that 'I object' is a negative, if only in intent by Sheldon. So put with the two 'nots' and the 'no' in this sentence, that is how it is being interpreted as a quadruple negation. Interesting article on this very statement on linguistrix.com from 18th Nov, 2011.

While certain words might carry a negative emotional charge (e.g., hate, hatred, etc.), they are still affirmative in a grammatical sense. I can see what your friend, Google, is saying, but I'm not certain that 'to object' falls into the same category as 'to hate' in that sense. If you are objecting to rape or racism, is there still a negative emotional charge? Yet, one could make the same claim about 'to hate.' Grammatical negation, however, is a matter of function indicated not by emotional response, but by specific morphemes that negate, or reverse, the original meaning of a particular notion. They are a fixed set and take the form of negating words (no, not, none, nor, etc.) or affixes (un-, in, -less, etc.).  In context: when I object to a judge's ruling, I am affirming a particular notion; when I do not object, I am negating (in a sense reversing) the function of that of the previous utterance. By definition, what you're talking about with 'to object' is a semantic issue; negation is a functional or grammatical issue.

LOVED the double positive.  I gotta remember that one.  As I was reading the whole durn thing I was thinking there is no case of a double positve being used as a negative.  Ha!