Don't not feel negative

"Do you like eggplant?" asked my friend. This was a serious question, requiring serious consideration. Deep-fried eggplant, undoubtedly the least healthy way to eat eggplant, can be quite tasty. But then, properly seasoned, deep-fried cardboard might also be palatable. Eggplant in general, though, seems to have the texture that I imagine octopus would have – leathery, squishy, unpleasant. I guess it depends what you do to the eggplant to make it less, well, eggplantish. So my answer to the question, do you like eggplant, was a qualified, "Well, I don't not like it."

This is different, clearly, than either, "I like it" or "I don't like it."  It has a qualified, cautious negativity about it. And here's something you may never have wanted or needed to know: a litotes uses a double negative to create emphasis through understatement. Here's a litotes: "There is no way I cannot visit my mother this week." This emphasizes the urgency of visiting one's mother. It is a stronger statement than, "I must visit my mother this week."

There are many instances of double negatives in common parlance. Rules be damned; they are not at all unheard of.

"I don't not like it" is in no way grammatically incorrect, but it set off double negative questions in the niggling grammar gremlin who lives in a corner of my brain. Where did the double negative rule come from? To what extent is it really a rule?

We learned in school that double negatives are bad, right? "I won’t make no eggplant tonight!" I might say to my eggplant-loving friend (incorrect; 'any' instead of 'no' resolves the problem). "I looked for eggplant in the grocery store, but I couldn't find it nowhere," I might lie to this persistent and demanding friend ('anywhere' instead of 'nowhere' resolves the problem). "I can't get no satisfaction!" she might reply, channeling the Rolling Stones.

Leaving eggplant aside (please) let's look more deeply into the issue of double negatives. One of the reasons why we don't use them in standard English is that they can be confusing. "I don't have no money," literally says that I do have some money. In certain English dialects, though, like the cool dialogue of the streets, "I don't have no money" means that I really don’t have any money. This kind of double negative is used in some sectors of the American South and in various British regional dialects, among others.

It is interesting to note that the grammatical frowning upon of double negatives does not exist in every language, or at least, that each language has its own rules. In French, for example, "ne" and "pas," both negative words in their own right, surround a verb to make it negative. "Il aime les aubergines," (he likes eggplant) becomes "Il n'aime pas les aubergines," (he doesn't like eggplant, and really, who can blame him?). French allows double negatives in sentences like "Ce n'est pas rien," which literally says, "It's not nothing," and actually means, "It's nothing."

Many other languages regularly use double negatives. In Hebrew, for instance, if someone asks you for money, you might say, "Eyn alai klum," which literally says, "I don’t have nothing on me," which actually means that I do have something (because I don't have nothing), but colloquially means, "I don't have a thing on me."

Like so many rules we learned in school, the double negative rule is not black and white. Safe to say that in standard English, the whole business is somewhat murky. Where does the double negative rule come from? It was, in fact, written in stone by a Church of England theologian named Robert Lowth, who in 1762 wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar, in which he proposed many restrictions on what had historically been a rather polyglot, freewheeling language. The double negative rule is meant to avoid confusion. Lowth's rules, many taken from Latin, became the standard for English grammar. Grammar may have been more fun before that. Double and triple negatives? All the big literary guys were doin' it.

Wrote Shakespeare in 1601, in Twelfth Night: I have one heart, one bosom and one truth, And that no woman has, nor never none.

Shakespeare in As You Like It: Love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither…   

Earlier, around 1387, in Canterbury Tales, Chaucer wrote of the Friar, There nas no man no wher so virtuous (There never was no man nowhere so virtuous).

And, because in these times we cannot not speak about the war, let us conclude with this. We are all feeling, at various moments, frustrated, fearful, furious, fatalistic (alliteration; but that's for another day), and it's okay to feel this way. Don't not feel negative, because we do. It has been, and is, a very tough time. But also, don't not feel hopeful. Because better times are ahead.

Till next time, my friends.