busting the grammar police: double negatives
30 Jun 08
education, grammar police, language myths
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A visit to the many prescriptive grammarians who hang out in the blogosphere in order to save English from its speakers will establish what you knew already: your fourth grade teacher disapproved of double negatives.
Double negative equals a positive. It is a truism of traditional grammar that double negatives combine to form an affirmative. Readers coming across a sentence like He cannot do nothing will therefore interpret it as an affirmative statement meaning “He must do something” unless they are prompted to view it as dialect or nonstandard speech. 1
Your fourth grade teacher may well have been kind, helpful, and truly concerned that you got an education, and from that person you will have learned that in English, two negatives make a positive and thus that I don’t want none in fact means, please mother, pile those mushy canned peas even higher on my plate.
You were probably ten or so when you were first scolded about this, and given the underlying algebra to guide you into the light of grammatical goodness. 2
At ten, you probably hadn’t got so far in math class, so the two negatives make a positive rule would have meant as much to you as colorless green ideas sleep furiously. It sounds good, but there’s something missing — oh yeah, meaning. Of course, so much of what you were taught in fourth grade made no sense, you most likely just nodded politely and chalked it up to adult silliness.
Once you did get far enough into math and understood the origin of the two-negatives-make-a-positive rule, it was too late to go back to fourth grade and ask for clarification.
Miss Lack, if two negatives make a positive, what do three negatives make? How about five? If my mom says ‘I told you to never never never never never disturb my colorless green ideas when they are sleeping,’ does this mean I can poke her colorless green ideas with a stick, sleeping or not, whenever the urge takes me?
If this occurred to you at some point in your schooling, you discovered the limitations of the two-negatives-make-a-positive rule on your own. Most likely it didn’t occur to you, simply because you had heard the rule too often, and absorbed it into your social-grammatical self. Despite the fact that you hear multiple negatives all the time and understand them without resorting to a calculator, despite the fact (as you will learn in French class) that other languages revel in double, triple, multiple negation strategies and survive, even despite the fact that you can appreciate Bob Dylan, who knows a good double negative when he sees one — even after all that, if you do catch yourself using a double negative, you will still look over your shoulder in fear that Miss Lack is standing right there, ready to pounce.
The absurdity of the In-English -two-negatives- make-a-positive logic is there for us all to enjoy, but first you have to shake off the shackles of the grammar police.
- source; another less formalized example here. ↩
- Because that’s what the rule is — some nineteenth century grammarian lifted that rationale out of the realm of mathematics and transplanted it into the realm of English grammar. And other grammar police came along and watered it and lo, it has taken root and still casts us all in shade these many years. ↩
Interestingly, though, two negatives do sometimes make a positive. Take this example, which I found on the web:
This clearly means something like “…but eat SOMETHING or you’ll get very ill”,and I assume it would have that meaning even in dialects that have multiple negation. So the two-negatives-make-a-positive rule is generalized from dialects that don’t have multiple negation to dialects that do. In the latter, we should be able to say how speakers distinguish between the two-negatives-make-a-positive and the two-negatives-make-a-negative cases. In the example above, the contrastive focus helps, but presumably true double negatives can also have contrastive focus (something like “I don’t eat very little, I don’t eat NOTHING“ meaning “…I eat NOTHING“).
fghnj,oh yes, you can do almost anything with the right intonation. good point.
I do remember being corrected, though, when I said ‘you can’t do NOTHING.’ The right way, Miss Lack said, was ‘you must do SOMETHING.’
Which of course is not the same thing, but it made her prescriptivist little heart happy.
fghnj,I’m sorry but it sounds to me like you are saying that it should be perfectly tolerable for people to “not do nothing” about their double negatives, and if that’s the opinion you’re putting out there, I couldn’t disagree more. I would be the last person to purport that my grammar is perfect; however, there is no quicker way to come across as ignorant or at least uneducated than to throw around a bunch of double negatives in a job interview. People I know personally to be quite intelligent, when one of these double negatives comes out of their mouths, it just makes me want to grab them and shake them and save them from themselves by explaining how that simple act of laziness can undermine their success.
fghnj,Aunt Mag — thank you for stopping by, and for your response, too.
I am not going to try to refute your argument; in fact, I can’t refute your position because you’ve expressed an opinion. You prefer the sound of one formulation to the sound of another. One sounds good to you, and the other sounds ignorant or uneducated or lazy.
Of course you are entitled to see things and evaluate people as you see fit.
Just as I might say something like this: Women should not wear their hair long. Long hair is messy and undignified and harbors many bacteria. Women who do wear their hair long are poorly educated or ignorant or simply too stubborn to better themselves. They will be rejected by employers and others in positions of power. Whenever I see a woman with long hair, I want to shake her.
There are some problems with this analogy (women with long hair are not discriminated against, as far as I am aware), but that is actually my point: the preferences for short or long hair is a matter of aesthetics, as is the choice between grammatical strategies such as “I don’t want none” and “I don’t want any.”
fghnj,It may be true that it is my opinion that double negatives sound ignorant (and the opinion of many job interviewers). But would you not agree that there are rules of grammar? I base my “opinion” that someone “sounds ignorant” when he or she uses a double negative because he/she is violating one of those defined rules. Admittedly, people (I included) are not likely to equate the violation of many other rules of grammar with ignorance, although perhaps we should? These are rules we are all taught in grammar school (emphasis on the word grammar), much like we are taught math.
A better simile would be how we are taught to stop at a red traffic light. Math has truths, whereas grammar and traffic are governed by man-made rules. Yes, once upon a time, “thee” and “thou” were proper English. And some day when the grammar text editors concur that double negatives are acceptable, and thus the English professors of our country stop circling them with a red pen, then perhaps the “stereotype” that people who use them sound ignorant will evaporate with the rule.
But until then, we are called to follow the rules of proper English as they are taught, and those of us who don’t must realize our choice not to may undermine our success in a world that values those rules.
fghnj,I think it is closer to the truth to say that there are two kinds of rules in grammar. The author Stephen Pinker uses this analogy to make the distinction clear. He calls it the Taxi Cab Maxim.
A cab may violate the rules of the state of Massachusetts, but it cannot violate the rules of physics and fly away.
The real underlying grammar of English — its syntax — is not something native speakers argue about at all. You’ve never heard anybody say Dog the bit man the. You’ve never had to point out to anybody that they shouldn’t put their articles after their nouns.
The other kind of rule you are talking about is socially constructed, the same way so many of our behaviors are. A man who works in middle management in downtown Toledo will not suddenly show up to work in a sundress and sandals. That might be the most comfortable thing for him to wear in hot weather, but it wouldn’t occur to him. If he did such a thing, people would consider it shocking and inappropriate.
Much in the same way you and many other people consider double negatives inappropriate.
You are absolutely right that ‘don’t use a double negative’ is widely held to be an important restriction on how English is used. So I would tell a job candidate that certain behaviors are considered unacceptable. He should not wear a sundress to his interview, and he shouldn’t use double negatives.
Both rules are socially constructed and have no underlying truth to them, but they do influence the way people evaluate other people.
Which doesn’t make it right, I hasten to point out. I think it would be a much more efficient and fair world if we listened to the content of what people have to say rather than how they say it.
fghnj,I guess you’re saying (it’s your opinion that..) those rules shouldn’t be. But the truth is that when someone says he’s “not going nowhere” then if he meant to say he isn’t going anywhere, he has failed to communicate that accurately. There is a difference between saying you’re not going nowhere and you’re not going anywhere, plain and simple.
Another thing, the rules of grammar are written down and term papers and essays are judged by those rules. Your analogy would hold if the man in the sundress was working for an organization that had a clearly stated dress code that did not include sundresses.
But even if I acquiesce both that people can get the gist when someone uses a double negative and that rules of grammar and rules of dress are simply social constructs, it still doesn’t preclude an employer from _rightfully_ basing his decision to hire or not based on someone’s choice to adhere to the rules (grammar AND dress). An employer may be seeking someone with a penchant for order, for respecting the way that the society at large has defined “proper”.
For example, let’s say I get on a plane and the flight attendant in my section is covered in tattoos of skulls and flames and blood and guts, or worse, swastikas and racist phrases. Is the fact that I may be uncomfortable with that flight attendant unfounded? This is clearly a person who celebrates those images, and I don’t think it’s that far from reality to conclude that he is not likely to value order and calm, both values I would hope my flight attendant would hold in high regard. I’m not saying it’s ok for me to be uncomfortable based on something a person has no control over, such as his height or skin color, but someone who tattoos blood and guts all over himself was clearly going for some sort of message.
The bottom line of my point is that someone who chooses not to follow the rules of grammar as they have been defined should realize that a society that values submission to authority is likely to dish out some consequences. The employer may be seeking someone who is going to follow orders, and the applicant’s grammar and dress may be indicators of the probability he will. If the employer is seeking someone who “colors outside the lines”, then the tattooed, sundressed, double-negative user may be just the person for the job.
It’s my opinion that if one doesn’t like the rules, one should do one’s best to adhere to them in the meantime (unless the rule in question is unethical) until one succeeds in seeing the rules changed. I guess that’s the crux of the matter: submission to authority. I say one should submit, unless the authority is unethical. And it sounds like you are perhaps suggesting that an authority who makes such a rule against a double negative _is_ unethical.
fghnj,@auntmag:
Almost.
The element that hasn’t been raised yet is this: variation in language is seldom without coded meaning, and all spoken language varies.
Which reminds me: the written language I leave out of this discussion entirely. There are good reasons for that, but I don’t have time to go into them right now.
Variation in language exists on all levels. Pronunciation, lexicon, grammar, semantics — you name it. A large proportion of that variation is actually marked, and most of that marking functions below the level of consciousness. This is built into the language capability of humans.
The most obvious kind of variation is lexical and linked to geographical allegiance. I grew up saying bag (as in, I put all the groceries into a bag) while a good friend grew up saying sack. I’m from the north, she’s from the south.
There are hundreds of points of variation in vowel structure and intontation that you hear and react to, but not consciously. Your language may be marked for gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, religion, neighborhood affiliation, economics, and a dozen of other social allegiances. When people listen to you talk, they are noting those variations in and using them in a complex series of calculations as they try to place you into their social world.
I don’t have time right now to go into this in detail, but think about it. There are varieites of English that are highly favored, and varieties that are discriminated against. Language is sometimes used as a pretext for discrimination. So for example: The employer who says: I have nothing against [insert racial, economic, ethnic group here], but the way they talk offends me. Or, offends my customers. I’ve got to make a living here, so I can’t hire that person. The Supreme Court has said to this argument: discrimination does not excuse discrimination. And more crucially: language linked to protected categories (gender, age, race, etc) is protected under the law.
This is very abbreviated, but I have to stop for now. If you are really interested in this subject, there are some really good books out there written for non-linguists. My ‘English with an Accent’ is one of them.
fghnj,