Slashdot Mirror
Silicon Valley In 2013 Resembles Logan's Run In 2274
theodp writes "The 1976 science fiction film Logan's Run depicts a dystopian future society where life must end at the age of 30. So, it's a world that kind of resembles today's Silicon Valley, where the NY Times reports that the median age of workers is 29 years old at Google and 28 years old at Facebook. The report that technology workers are young — really young — comes on the heels of other presumably-unrelated stories that Silicon Valley execs can't find enough skilled workers and no one would fund Doug Engelbart in the last four decades of his life. On the bright side, at least old techies don't die in Silicon Valley — they just can't get hired."
"In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive...
This statement is wrong, and impressively so for a linguistics professor. It is filled with presumptions that are almost universally rejected by linguists (the idea of a uniform/correct standard of a language being the primary offense here). In SOME dialects of English a double negative forms a positive (and even in Standard American English this is not universal). In many (probably most, but I'm too lazy to do anything resembling an exhausting review of the literature right now) dialects of English a double negative is either the same as a simple negative or an intensifier of a negative. AAVE is the obvious example.
But, it's not a feature of English, it's a feature of some dialects of English.
This is a meaningless sentence. There is no such thing as "English." There is only a collection of mutually intelligible dialects that is referred to as English. Saying that something is not a feature of the collection, but only a feature of a subset is redundant. There are very few features that are universal across all dialects of English.
Or, to put it another way, how long do you think you'd be able to keep a job writing business memos or reports if you were using double negatives for emphasis? I'm guessing you'd very quickly be made to either change the language, or change your job.
This is a stupid point and it has nothing to do with linguistics. The fact that some dialects are considered low status and others carry social prestige does not make either correct or wrong. There is no such thing as "correct" English. There are two major dialects which are treated as educational standards (which is what you are referring to), but that is an arbitrary social status, and neither of them is "correct" (and they differ from each other in several substantial ways such that they certainly couldn't both be correct even if such a thing existed as a "correct" language).