Comments by "Louie Berg" (@louieberg2942) on "RobWords" channel.

  1. Good teachers! It can be fine to first teach using hard and fast rules, but over time colloquial speech should be the focus.
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  2. Yeah, it really depends on the context. Many double-negatives are colloquial speech and make sense if you hear them. Aint nobody got time for that, in context, can only really mean one thing. To hear it the other way, is to be deaf (willingly or not) to the context. Double-negatives can certainly cause ambiguity, especially if the context offers no help. "Don't you not want to help?" is a sentence that is better off being written differently, because there are multiple ways to interpret it. Worse still, answering this question is tricky. What does a respondent mean when they answer "yes" and what do they mean when they answer "no"? Had I just asked "Do you want to help?" both my question and the answer are clear without further clarification.
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  3. You sound elitist.
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  4. It can always just be your personal style. It's wagging the finger at others and calling them out for it that should be reconsidered. If you don't do this to begin with, then be on your merry way.
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  5. Aint nothing but a thing, hon.
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  6. It's all about clarity and effective communication to me. Many of the linguistic rules help with this. As Rob has shown, however, plenty of these rules aren't even rules. Pedants use these rules as sticks with which to beat others, just for a sense of superiority. I used to be prescriptive in language, until I reflected on that urge. I can understand people wanting to cling to certain rules for aesthetic reasons, but then you also need to accept that you cannot force those preferences upon others as a hard rule.
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  7. For all intensive purposes... I could care less. Isn't a Folk Etymology just a commonly accepted eggcorn? It sounds as though their genesis is the same.
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  8. So the Dutch language inserted the H in Ghost and then stopped doing so itself. Ghost = Geest.
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  9.  @AerynBella  Wherefore has always made intuitive sense to me as a Dutch person. Wherefore -> Waarvoor -> for what reason.
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  10. Aint nothing here to concern yourself with.
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  11. No reason to correct it, either... unless the double-negative leads to ambiguity.
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  12. To go baldly
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