Thursday, 16 June 2016

word choice - "Can hardly wait" versus "can't hardly wait"

They're interchangeable -- "can't hardly" is a regional/dialectical variant. The proscription against emphatic double negatives is purely artificial in English; they have been around as long as the English language itself.




Ne con ic noht singan; and ic for žon of þeossum gebeorscipe ut eode ond hider gewat, for þon ic naht singan ne cuðe.




Twice in that sentence (from the prologue to Cædmon's Poem from the Venerable Bede), Cædmon says the equivalent of "I can't sing nothing". Similar examples can be found in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the letters of Abigail Adams, and so on.



Double negatives used for emphasis are as idiomatic to English as split infinitives. Use whichever version you're comfortable with -- unless you're turning a composition in to be marked -- and realise that others do not need to be corrected out of it.

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