While the word anymore is usually a negative context, the positive anymore is a well-documented phenomenon. I found this surprising, because I had never come across the positive anymore in a conversational or written context before. I consulted Bryan M. Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which seemed to suggest that the positive use of anymore can be considered correct.
My question to you: is the positive use of anymore considered correct spoken/standard written English?
Best Answer
Here is what Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, second edition (2003) says about anymore used in the sense of "nowadays":
Garner notes that anymore is standard in U.S. English when it appears in negative constructions ("Don't do X anymore"), in questions ("are they X anymore?"), and in hypotheticals ("whether we X anymore"). But in positive declarative statements such as "People are rude anymore," Garner holds (accurately, in my opinion) that the usage is not standard across U.S. English, but dialectal.
The form of expression has been around for a long time, as is evident from these examples reported in Harold Wentworth, American Dialect Dictionary (1944):
Although Wentworth indicates that Northern Appalachia (West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Kentucky) is the primary locus of such usage, he also finds instances from New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Kansas, southern Ontario, Michigan, Montana, and (as noted above) Iowa and Illinois. The examples of dialectal any more in American Dialect Dictionary, despite being set in small type, come close to filling two complete print pages. Still, notwithstanding such wide distribution, the expression remains dialectal—and Wentworth reports no instances from New England, the Pacific states, much of the interior West, the Southwest, and much of the South.
So the answer to your question "is the positive use of anymore considered correct spoken/standard written English?" seems to be that it may be considered so by English speakers for whom the dialectal use is natural, but not by others. And as Garner remarks, even in areas (such as Missouri) where the usage is currently familiar to many people, "many didn't like it."