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No

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No is an English word indicating rejection, disagreement, refusal or making a negative response or exclamation. It is the opposite of yes.

Several programs aimed at children advocate the refusal skill of "saying no" in regard to high-risk behaviors, violence, drug, or sexual matters. For example the American television advertising campaign Just Say No in the 1980s aimed at spreading awareness about saying "no" to recreational drug use, violence, premarital sex, and other vices.

Syntax

In English, no is used more broadly than yes. No stands by itself as a grammatically sufficient and well-formed response to questions that can be answered yes or no. No also functions as a negative determiner, and can appear before any class of noun: count nouns (No cats are herbivores), mass nouns (There is no sugar in my tea) and abstract nouns (No peace is unwelcome). With count nouns, no also serves as the determiner that corresponds to the cardinal number zero; the stand-alone and pronoun form that corresponds to it is none (No cats are herbivores; none can fly, either).

Political no's

The Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas on October 28 1940 rejected an ultimatum made by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. To this day this political no is commemorated and celebrated during Okhi Day.

On December 1, 1955 the American Rosa Parks said, "No, I'm not" to a bus driver when asked if she was going to stand up on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama so that a white person could take her seat. This refusal led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott during the early years of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

The essay The Japan That Can Say No, co-written by Sony chairman Akio Morita and politician Shintaro Ishihara in 1989, describes their (Ishihara's in particular) vision of a Japanese government that is more than a mere "yes man" to the United States.

In 1996 the book China Can Say No was written, which expresses Chinese nationalism and rejection of a too strong embrace of western values.

Saying no in the arts

The theme of saying no is dealt with in the arts in several ways. The problem of not being able to say "no" appears most often. In music, various songs and albums are about "saying no": Don't Say No (1980), "If You Can't Say No" (1998). The theme is also used in film, TV and theatre: no less than four films titled She Couldn't Say No, Just Say No (1988), "Feel Free to Say No" (2007), the Flintstones special episode for the Just Say No campaign, "The Flintstone Kids' "Just Say No" Special''".

See also

References



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