Posted: Dec 22, 2011 9:13 pm
nunnington wrote:
One interesting thing about these is that against things like 'you don't know shit', where we have two negative markers, not and shit, in 'you know fuck-all', the first negative marker has disappeared. This is rather similar to French apparently, where in colloquial speech the 'ne' can be omitted, just leaving the 'pas'.
There is something here about redundancy maybe, that two negative markers are not needed, so one can be left out.
This is an interesting suggestion.
I read these examples as variations on "You know nothing", where "nothing" is replaced by expressions like "fuck all" or "bugger all". But it is certainly interesting to look at them in the light of what has happened in French.
Hmm. Now I'm wondering - is it possible to say "You don't know fuck-all?"