Here's an explanation that helps makes it make sense: http://www.future-perfect.co.uk/grammar-tip/is-it-thank-you-thankyou-or-thank-you/
Well in the Floridian East-Central Coastal subregion of the South-East speaking region of the U.S., "don't pay him no nevermind" is a phrase I heard more than once.
But that would make 'nevermind' an object and as a noun, correct. 'No' instead of 'any' on the other hand, ...
Languages shift. I suppose that we should trust our spell-checkers (spellcheckers?) unless we're trying to make slang accepted. I wish I could find the comic about capitalizing nouns. I thought it was about that one disturbing yaoi girl, but the only useful thing I found was a quote.
Everytime - just wrote everytime to see what response I got from my spell check and yes I got the red underline - the alternative options offered were; every time, every-time and everything. So everything is okay and everytime is not - what's the difference? I'm confused!
The difference and the confusion you feel Trilby is because English is unique amongst the major Indo-European languages in that it has never taken, in fact has stoutly resisted, any orthographic or lexicographic reform or revision; thus, it is ruled by accumulated idiosyncrasies. Most other major IE languages have had a point in time where the linguistic powers that be sat down and tried to clean up at least the more unusual and unpredictable spellings and written forms of constructions. The above examples you give show where the syntactic functions of the words are similar, but their written form is not, thus showing a disconnect of logic. ETA: Not your logic, Trilby, but the logic of the way to write those structures. Your logic is perfectly sound in noting that there are unpredictable discrepancies.
@jannert Maybe your student was from Germany? Thanks to Nirvana I thought for the longest time 'never mind' was spelled 'nevermind'. But then Word fixed it for me. I do find the compound word "system" of English completely erratic and random at times. At the moment I'm teaching nursing English and the human anatomy alone gives my students a collective headache. On the other hand, in Finnish you should string compound words together like in German or Swedish, for example, but over the years it's become a huge mess, leading to misunderstandings and unintelligible writing. I'm not sure if it's just laziness or if English has played a part there...
I think I'm a wee bit older than you MLM (quite a bit older if I'm honest) I took the name Trilby from the Novel Trilby by George du Maurier.
A play of the novel was put on in London (many moons ago) Next door to the theatre was Fenwick's milliners, the director of the play had a hat made there for the leading lady of the play, Trilby - hence the trilby had been invented and yes it was a hat for women.
all of this only proves the point that english is the least logically-structured language in the world and the most confused/confusing one, to boot! and born-to-enlish-speakers probably the most confused, poorest practitioners of their own tongue...
They aren't. A lot of foreign people have difficulty with it. Native English speakers seem to communicate amongst themselves perfectly well. Foreigners tend to have more experience learning and speaking second (and third) languages than native English speakers, but that doesn't make them "better" at the language than the natives.