Learn English – What’s the “opposite” of “any more”

grammaticalitynegation

Consider the following sentence:

[This] is not important for the younger generation any more.

Now let's suppose that for some reason I am willing or obliged to use the adjective "unimportant" instead of "not important"1. Would the following sentence be grammatical?

[This] is unimportant for the younger generation any more.

If it's not, is there anything I could replace "any more" with to preserve the meaning but make the sentence grammatical?

My question is purely out of curiosity. What's the equivalent, if any, of any more that can be used in sentences where the verb is affirmative?

1 Instead of not important/unimportant any other similar pair could do, e.g. not useful/useless.

Best Answer

The construction is unimportant ... any more is not generally accepted. As noted in wiktionary (and amplified in answers to the question What are the possible meanings of positive any more Peter Shor mentioned), any more is used:

  1. In negative or interrogative constructions: from a given time onwards; longer, again. (eg) They don't make repairable radios any more.
  2. (colloquial, chiefly Northern Ireland, US) In positive constructions: now, from now on. (eg) ‘Quite absurd,’ he said. ‘Suffering bores me, any more.’ (DH Lawrence, Women in Love)

To retain the slight sense of change in your original example, one can replace is with has become near the beginning of the sentence:

This has become unimportant for the younger generation.

You can use now as previously suggested ("This is unimportant for the younger generation now"), but note that unless a contrast has been made, now appears superfluous; the present-tense statement "This is unimportant for the younger generation" will have the nearly same meaning.

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