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From: David Newall <davidn@davidnewall.com>
To: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Daolong Wang <ahlongxp@gmail.com>,
	David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
	bhutchings@solarflare.com, lizf@cn.fujitsu.com,
	qhfeng.kernel@gmail.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] NET: fix wrong English expression in comments
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:39:38 +1030	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <496C8482.3060503@davidnewall.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090113090402.33d36725@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>

Alan Cox wrote:
>> "Don't add nothing," is not a colloquialism; it's just bad grammar.  The
>>     
>
> It's a matter of dialect. For historical reasons English emerged from a
> mix of languages and cultures (even within the UK). In some of the
> originating languages and areas a double negative is emphatic in others
> it negates the negation. Thus it is a bad idea when using globally - as
> nobody is quite sure what you mean.

There's an amusing story about a lecture, in which the professor was
saying that in many cultures, in many languages, a double negative
becomes a positive, but that nowhere did a double positive become a
negative. From the back of the class drifted a bored, "yeah, yeah!"

  reply	other threads:[~2009-01-13 12:09 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2009-01-11 18:36 [PATCH] NET: fix wrong English expression in comments Qinghuang Feng
2009-01-12  1:05 ` Li Zefan
2009-01-12  1:39   ` Ben Hutchings
2009-01-13  5:53     ` David Miller
2009-01-13  6:16       ` Daolong Wang
2009-01-13  8:41         ` David Newall
2009-01-13  9:04           ` Alan Cox
2009-01-13 12:09             ` David Newall [this message]
2009-01-13 23:22           ` Valdis.Kletnieks
2009-01-13 23:30             ` Randy Dunlap
     [not found]   ` <6b1ba94c0901122336r511fa316o5f520a8d2d9d6e0@mail.gmail.com>
2009-01-13  7:44     ` David Miller
2009-01-13  7:56       ` Li Zefan
2009-01-13  7:57       ` Eric Dumazet
2009-01-13  8:52         ` Oliver Hartkopp

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