Excerpt from The Far Country The use of double negatives, for instance, among millions of people from generation to generation was not a caprice or an acci dent nor wholly due to imitation. Neither was it as much of a blunder as you might think. There must be many reasons for the preservation of any changes in speech, but I am sure one reason must be their assonance and rhythm. The human tongue dislikes to stumble. Human breathing imposes a loose but recognizable meter. The alliteration of not's, no's, nothing's, never's, and none's can put music and emotion into otherwise commonplace sentences, and their placement can emphasize the factual content. The idiom that goes with all such happy errors fits rhythmically around them. To improve the grammar in an idiomatic construction is usually to empty it, as if you had pulled out a plug. During the same period a genteel nasty-nice written English had developed, doted on by the semiliterate. Thus Unwin writes, The birds was chanting their matin hymns, rendering the grove musical with their melodies. These verbal mincings are scattered through his native vulgate partly because in his case they, too, are correct, but mainly because the contrast is comical. The phonetic misspelling of words, however, has been left out almost entirely. Uncle Remus, to my mind, is hard to read because it is solidly misspelled. Huckleberry Finn, to 'my mind, is easier to read because it is less so. And this book is still easier. You may know that Unwin would have said agin where he writes again and had 'a' been where he writes had been. But it is not important anyway. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.