EDIT: you guys have dug up some truly horrible pisstakes :D Thank you for those.
To the serious folk - relax a little. This is Mildly Infuriating, not I'm dying if this doesn't stop. As a non-native speaker I was taught a certain way to use the language. The rules were not written down by me, nor the teachers - it was done by the native folk. Peace!
Isn’t every rule just a preference of someone influential enough to make it into a rule?
No.
There’s two types of grammar rules. There’s the real grammar rules, which you intuitively learn as a kid and don’t have to be explicitly taught.
For example, any native English speaker can tell you that there’s something off about “the iron great purple old big ball” and that it should really be “the great big old purple iron ball”, even though many aren’t even aware that English has an adjective precedence rule.
Then there’s the fake rules like “ain’t ain’t a real word”, ‘don’t split infinitives’ or “no double negatives”. Those ones are trumped up preferences, often with a classist or racist origin.
It certainly sounds like you have a strong preference how to split preferences into two groups. ;)
The trouble with double negatives in I think Germanic languages in general is that they’re possibly ambiguous, relying on either tone and context or complex grammar to disambiguate whether you mean to negate a negative or mean to pile them up. Also negating negatives should be avoided if you can say things straight-up, there has to be plenty of reason to choose “Don’t not go there” over “Do go there”.
But that’s all style. It has also been said that you should describe how things are, not how they aren’t, and then Douglas Adams comes along and describes a space ship as “hanging in the air in the way that bricks don’t” which is pure brilliance (because it says, in negative space, something else about what that ship is: Eerie to the onlookers). Rules are there so you stop and think before you break them. If you want to write like Douglas Adams just make sure that you always wait until the traffic light turns yellow.
One important thing to realize is that different dialects of English have slightly different grammars.
One place where different dialects differ is around negation. Some dialects, like Appalachian English or West Texas English, exhibit ‘negative concord’, where parts of a sentence must agree in negation. For example, “Nobody ain’t doin’ nothing’ wrong”.
One of the most important thing to understanding a sentence is to figure out the dialect of its speaker. You’ll also notice that with sentences with ambiguous terminology like “he ate biscuits” - were they cookies, or something that looked like a scone? Rules are always contextual, based on the variety of the language being spoken.
How would Appalachian English say “Don’t not go there”? Even languages that only use negative concord have constructions to do double negatives, in Russian that’s done like “This is not unprovable” vs. “This is provable”, with “un-” (“без- / бес-”) being a very productive modifier. Sometimes the double negation becomes so common that it becomes part of the word, say небезопасный, “nonundangerous”.
I would expect, in practice, something like “Don’t stay away from there” but as we’re talking about a dialect continuum it doesn’t sound terribly unlikely for people to simply switch grammar (not necessarily phonetics or lexicon) to a dialect in which there’s no negative concord. And that, mostly, is what I mean by “ambiguous”.
I’ve always heard it more as “ain’t nobody doin’ nothing wrong”
So many tour guides for cities say things like “do not skip going to” or similar. It’s just a linguistic choice.
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Mans needa yeet the whack ass non-Gucci words bruh
@TheEntity some are, like the Prepositions rule, which was invented in the 19th century by some idiots who wished English was more like Latin.
Some are just people making observations about what everyone habitually already does, like Adjectival Order (e.g big brown dog not brown big dog).
Native speakers never have to be taught that rule because it just “feels right” since it’s how our societies talk.