Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right
by Angela Arlia

aaaane always hears the most fascinating massacring of the English language while living in New York City. I'm not sure why it happens so much here. It probably happens almost everywhere in the United States, it's just that I don't hear it because I don't live in the rest of the United States. That's just as well, as I have my work cut out for me enough here in the Big Apple. aaaaJust the other day, for example, I heard a massive car accident occurring in my brain. The culprit of this accident was this phrase, overheard being spoken between two friends on the subway: "She don't know nothing about me". There were hubcaps and tires rolling around everywhere. Some shards of glass were along the side of the road as well. Luckily, no one was hurt; nothing was damaged except my ear canal. aaaaWhy did this phrase of six small words inflict such torture? There are two very good reasons why I feel obligated to delineate them.
	aa	aaaaFirst Reason: Normally, it's very simple for verbs to be conjugated in the present tense. We simply use the base of the verb and add a pronoun. The base of a verb is the part of the verb that isn't the "to". For instance, in the infinitive "to do", the "to" tells us it's an infinitive but the "do" is actually the base of the verb. It's the part of the verb we do all the conjugating around. Therefore, I (pronoun) plus do (verb base) equals "I do", a simple sentence in the present tense.
aaaaHowever, when he, she or it is the pronoun (as opposed to I, you, we, or they), the verb is conjugated the way described above, but undergoes a spelling change. Usually, you add an "s" to the verb base; sometimes you add an "es", as is the case with the verb "to do". It becomes "he does", "she does" or "it does". When you negate those sentences, you add "not" after the conjugated verb or you contract the verb, making it either "she does not" or "she doesn't". So in the screeching error I heard, the third person is negated but the verb used is incorrect. aaaaSecond Reason: The second problem has to do with the use of negatives in English. English sentences shouldn't use two negatives because it changes the meaning of the sentence. It's very mathematical really. In mathematics, two negatives, multiplied, equal a positive. This means that, if you use a negative verb (even if it's incorrectly conjugated, like in the example sentence above), you must use "anything" (or "anyone" or "anybody"), so that you do not have another negative in the sentence. Nothing, nobody or no one are considered negatives, so if the verb is already negative, you can't use a negative quantifier. If the sentence were a positive one, "nothing" could have been used, e.g., She knows nothing about me. However, because the sentence included a negative verb, it must use "anything"' to give it the same force and meaning that I believe was intended. As spoken, the meaning inferred from the sample sentence is that the nameless She did, in fact, know something about the speaker (since "she don't know nothing" means that she does know something). aaaaOften when I hear these English disharmonies, I worry about my ESL students and what they hear outside the classroom. As I encounter more and more of these gems on a daily basis, I think you can see why I worry for my students and the safety of their ear canals in this accident-prone grammar environment.