Page:The American Language.djvu/248

230 ample, "Matthewson was not only going as far as the coast," meaning, as the context shows, that he was going as far as the coast and no further. Only gets into many other examples, e. g., "he hadn't only the one pass" and "I don't work nights no more, only except Sunday nights." This latter I got from a car conductor. Many other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among them: "one swaller don't make no summer," "I never seen nothing I would of rather saw," and "once a child gets burnt once it won't never stick its hand in no fire no more," and so on. The last embodies a triple negative. In "the more faster you go, the sooner you don't get there" there is an elaborate muddling of negatives that is very characteristic.

Like most other examples of "bad grammar" encountered in American the compound negative is of great antiquity and was once quite respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In that language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a particle, ne. Thus, singan (= to sing) became ne singan (=not to sing). In case the verb began with a vowel the ne dropped its e and was combined with the verb, as in naefre (never), from ne-aefre (not ever). In case the verb began with an h or a w followed by a vowel, the h or w of the verb and the e of ne were both dropped, as in naefth (=has not), from ne-haefth (=not has), and nolde (= would not), from ne-wolde. Finally, in case the vowel following a w was an i, it changed to y, as in nyste (knew not), from newiste. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon was a fully inflected language the inflections for the negative did not stop with the verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite pronoun and even some of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors of those forms appear to this day in such words as none and nothing. Moreover, when an actual inflection was impossible it was the practise to insert this ne before a word, in the sense of our no or not. Still more, it came to be the practise to reinforce ne, before a vowel, with na (=not) or naht (= nothing), which later degenerated to nat and not. As a result, there were fearful and wonderful combinations of negatives, some of them fully matching the best efforts of Lardner's baseball player. Sweet