And So Isn’t He

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is John Noor, calling from Pulteney, Vermont.

How can we help you?

I used to live in northern Maine, where I was an art teacher. Among all the things that I heard as far as pronunciations and word usage, one thing that I heard quite often, not just from students, but also from their parents occasionally, was a grammatical departure, where certain words were used to represent a positive aspect, such as the word isn’t actually meant is, and doesn’t actually meant does.

Can you give us a conversation that might have that?

So if I was going to go to a party with Michael and, say, Brian, then I might say, me and Michael are going to a party, and so isn’t Brian.

Oh, interesting.

Is Brian going to the party?

Brian is going to the party.

Okay.

But I would say isn’t instead of is.

Interesting.

And it works for doesn’t and won’t. Won’t means will.

And was that confusing for you when you moved there?

It was, especially when I tried to correct my students. They would look at me like I had four arms or three eyes.

Okay, yeah, that would be a problem.

Yeah, this is a… the classic way that this sounds is it sounds like a negative that’s being treated as a positive, right?

Absolutely.

Because that not, that contraction of not, it almost always exists with an auxiliary verb and not as a contraction. And that’s an important part of this.

So just to tell you, the best source for information on this is the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, which has a really great entry on this, academic stuff with real research collected over decades and a map and a variety of things. And one of the things that they talk about at the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, if you look it up, look for so don’t I, because that’s a common form of it. They talk about implicature. And what this means is the don’t in so don’t I is kind of responding to a presumption that the second speaker or the person being talked about isn’t the thing that’s being talked about.

And here’s an example that they give at the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. I play basketball. Yeah, so don’t I. And so the kind of implication there is that the first speaker is assuming that the second person doesn’t. And the second person is kind of negating that through an affirmation, which is really interesting. Does that make sense?

So they’re talking directly to the implication that they don’t play basketball. At the same time, and they’re saying they do play basketball.

It’s really nice.

Once it’s explained and you start to look at all the different examples, you’re like, okay, now I get that. Now that’s making sense to me.

But it’s still alive and well. We have records back well into the 60s, maybe even into the 50s, that show that this particular speech pattern has existed for a long time, and it’s just never really left New England, except when people from New England take it to their families. But there’s no other large community of people that use this particular construction.

Well, John, thank you so much for your call.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Nice talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if anybody’s looked at you like you had four arms or three eyes because of something you said when you moved to a different part of the country, we’d love to hear about it. You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.