Commentary

Don't Use Double Negatives (Unless You Know How To)

A double negative equals a positive, right? Negative 1 times negative 1 equals a positive 1? In English composition, a double negative occurs when two negations inhabit the same sentence. For example, the sentence “I don’t have no money,” according to strict grammarians, is logically construed as “I have money.” There are three main problems here.

First, grammar is not very logical, and it certainly does not abide by the rules of math. Second, even if grammar in the case of a double negative did abide by the rules of math, the mathematical operation implied by the grammarian’s premise should not be multiplication but rather addition (more on this later). Third, and most importantly, is the fact that we gather much meaning from context, and the law of the double negative is indifferent to this essential component of human communication.

Elite grammarians fully invest their arguments in synthetic grammar, which is the grammar that grade-school teachers implant in our brains. But also in our brains is an organic grammar, which is the grammar that is inborn and developed during the critical language-acquisition period (first few years of life). Sometimes there is tension between these two grammars. For example, synthetic grammar rejects the double negative as being illogical with respect to its intended meaning, but organic grammar embraces it, providing a path to comprehension. To bolster their suppositions, elite grammarians deduce that double negatives are accidental emissions from uneducated people that have unfortunate and unintended meanings. But they dismiss the nuance of language and fail to acknowledge that double negatives often emerge from a natural impulse to characterize something as really, really negative.

Karl Popper, the noted philosopher of science, once said that people are not logical; they are psychological. And so follows language. There are many circumstances in which a double negative may be employed for beneficial (albeit sometimes accidental) effect. I think that the two most widely employed forms of the double negative are intensification and understatement. The first is not welcome in formal communication, but the second one is (in fact, it can be rather witty).

Intensification

A double negative can intensify the negative aspect of a declaration. Consider this double negative: “I ain’t got no money.” Intensification occurs because the second negative (“no”) doubles the force of the first negative (the contracted “not” in “ain’t”). Does anyone really misunderstand the meaning of the sentence? Of course not. Why does the grammar maven’s explanation for the double-negative rule fall apart? The concept of multiplication is rotten.

Trying to figure out why a negative times a negative equals a positive requires a complex linguistic thought experiment because the concept is so irrelevant to speech (can you explain this concept to a fifth-grade math student? A college math student?). But addition in our language is elemental and readily supplants the analogy of multiplication. Consider our example sentence:

I do not have no money.

With multiplication, the “not” and the “no” are negatives that multiply to give us a positive (I do have money). Absurd. It’s more accurate to say that the negatives add like two Lego blocks; I really, really have no money.

In this more reasonable mathematical operation, the double negative acts as an intensifier, strongly and negatively biasing the sentence. But the speaker or writer of it will not survive vilification. You simply cannot speak or write such a double negative without people thinking that you are uneducated (or at least undereducated).

Understatement

Understatement and artistic ambiguity may be cleverly achieved with a double negative. In rhetoric, the term for an understatement by way of a double negative is called a litotes. For example, rather than saying that someone is merely moderately smart, you can say that he is “not unintelligent.” In this way, the double negative can be employed to make a back-handed compliment.

Litotes can also be employed to create an impressionistic (and sometimes dramatic) meaning. For example, consider this lyric snippet by Neal Peart: “Life is not unpleasant in their little neighborhood.” Although life is not unpleasant here, it certainly is not pleasant. This clever double negative (“not” and the prefix “un”) swells with nuance. It is a sad declaration, isn’t it? These people do not have pleasant lives, but they don’t complain--they carry on between the pleasant and the unpleasant poles of the human condition, stuck in the middle. This sentence exemplifies the “exclusionary principle” of litotes, wherein the negated term (“unpleasant”) and its opposite are excluded from possibility by a well-crafted double negative. The reality is somewhere between the two terms, which is why a litotes can be employed to indirectly (and safely) characterize something as mediocre. In this case, “pleasant” is indirectly excluded from the lives of the denizens of Middletown.

Final Words on Double Negatives

Eschew the double negative, but do it for the proper reason. Not because it magically transforms a really negative sentence into a positive, but because it has a lot of linguistic baggage. Alas, the intensifying types of double negatives are inexorably associated with lower learning and malformed language skills, and there are few exceptions (Nobody Doesn’t Like Sara Lee). They are stigmata to the author. To use one as an intensifier will get you nowhere in the intellectual crowd. Such use smacks of the informal and the quaint, especially in formal compositions. Also, using a double negative as an understatement (litotes) may go over the head of the reader or even be interpreted as petty instead of clever. However, if you are certain that your audience is literary, such a figure of speech may be just the thing to satisfy them.