Oct 21, 2009
Would you rather be wrong with Shakespeare or right with supercilious pedants?
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Correctness, of course, is a schoolmarm’s hallucination; there are more double negatives in Shakespeare and Chaucer than on New York’s 10th Avenue.
-Clifton Fadiman quoted in the New York Times by Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
(via Kevin Ring)
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Related:
- A grammar book I paged through said this sentence is correct. What say you?
- These kinds of books are sad: English serves you. You don’t serve English.
- …and almost everything else I write about language.
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The real question, of course, if whether double negatives were wrong in Shakespeare’s day. Grammar rules change, and I seem to remember that spelling rules weren’t fixed in Shakespeare’s time, so maybe grammar rules were different too.
Well, OF COURSE, I want to be right, regardless of whether Shakespeare is or not. The real question is whether Shakespeare is really wrong.
That’s a little like asking “Would you rather go to Hell with the cool people or go to Heaven with the boring people?”
I would think it were a little more like asking, “Would you rather do the unmannerly thing with God or do the “right” thing with the Pharisees.”
God’s not about manners.
Well I wouldn’t want to not agree with Shakespeare … so I won’t.
The double negative is an essential piece of intellectual apparatus.
I bought my wife a nice cross pedant for her birthday and now she’s looking for a stainless steel chain to go with it.
As much as I would say I loath the display of supercilious pendants, I catch myself sneaking a peek–or making them–often.
That being said, I’d rather be wrong with Shakespeare.
“How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card of equivocation will undo us.”
~ Hamlet
OR, not OF.
Good old equivocation.