I made an embarrassing mistake the other day. I wrote "I can't hardly believe..." when I should have written "I can hardly believe..."
"Can't hardly" is an example of a double negative—something many writing experts say you should avoid—and it also doesn't make much sense if you look at it logically. Often double negatives mean the opposite of what you are trying to say. (But you may have heard me say before that English isn’t always a logical language, and you’ll see that’s the case here too.)
Double Negatives in Chaucer and
Shakespeare
Double
negatives used to be much more common in
English than they
are today, and Chaucer seemed to like them. For example, he describes the
Knight in “The Canterbury Tales" by saying, “He never yet no vileness
didn’t say.” That’s more than a double negative! That’s a multiple
negative.
Shakespeare
also used double negatives. For example, in “As You Like It,” Celia says, “I cannot go no further.” If “you can go no further”
was negative, then “you can’t go no further” was even more negative or
emphatic.
In Shakespeare’s
and Chaucer’s time, it was normal to use double and triple negatives to add
emphasis, and even today, other languages, such as Spanish and French, also use
double negatives to add emphasis to the negativity.
In some
dialects today, people still use double negatives for emphasis. For example,
“I’m not doing nothing” can seem stronger than “I’m not doing anything.” But
double negatives like that aren’t considered Standard English anymore. In other
words, some people will look down on you if you use them.
The
Original Rules Against Double Negatives
It wasn’t
until the eighteenth century that prescriptivist grammarians started saying we
shouldn’t use double negatives in English because they aren’t logical. Robert
Lowth, a bishop and toweringly influential grammarian of his time, and who is
also known for promoting the idea that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, advised people to avoid double
negatives. Lindley
Murray, another influential grammarian, repeated the advice in the early
nineteenth century, writing in his book “An English Grammar,”
Two
negatives, in English, destroy one another, or are equivalent to an
affirmative.
He gives
this example sentence:
His
language, though inelegant, is not ungrammatical.
He advises
that instead of using the double negative and saying “not ungrammatical,” you
should say “it is grammatical.”
1. Double Negatives
Can Convey Complicated Meanings
In more
recent times, though, many writers have decided this is a much too
simplistic view of English. Our language isn’t as straightforward as math. Some double negatives can subtly change
the meaning of a sentence. “Not ungrammatical” seems like fainter praise than “grammatical.”
Another
example would be when you say something like “I’m not unhappy that Norman got
fired.” You can’t go so far as to say you’re happy about it, but you’re not
unhappy about it either. In this case, the “not” doesn’t cancel out the
“unhappy.” “Not unhappy” isn’t the same as “happy.” It’s something more
complicated.
2. Double Negatives
Can Keep the Emphasis on the Negative
Occasionally,
double negatives are useful when you want to place emphasis on something bad.
For example, I once saw a sentence in the “New Scientist” that
referred to “less unhealthy cigarettes.” "Less unhealthy" is a
double negative—"healthier" would be the positive way to say it—but
"less unhealthy" keeps the emphasis on cigarettes' dangers.
3. Double Negatives
Can Leave a Way Out
In a 2016
paper, Merima Osmankadić from the University of Sarajevo did a deep dive on how
people use double negatives in politics and found many of these uses and more.
For example, double negatives can also leave the
speaker a way out. It’s easier to back away from a statement in which you say it is “not
unlikely” that someone is guilty than a statement in which you say it is
“likely” that someone is guilty. It can also be perceived as being polite or
being less threatening to make the statement in this slightly softer way.
I also
sometimes interpret such statements as concessions: Although you’d like to
believe it’s not true, it could be. For example, if evidence was mounting that
Squiggly committed a crime even though I didn’t want to believe it, I might say
something like “Well, it’s not inconceivable that Squiggly stole the
chocolate and lied about it.”
4. Double Negatives
Can Arise When There’s No Positive Equivalent
Double
negatives also pop up when there isn’t a direct positive phrase you can use. In
fact, just today I noticed I used a double negative when my husband misread a
candy bar that said it was a dark chocolate baton, thinking it said it was dark chocolate bacon. To which I
replied, “Well, that wouldn’t be unheard of.” I could have reworded the
sentence completely, but saying, “Well, that’s heard of” isn’t an option. It’s
not something we say in English.
Similar
phrases Osmankadić highlighted include saying you are “not indifferent” to
something (you can’t say you “are different” to something), and saying
something “can’t continue indefinitely" (again, “definitely” isn’t the
opposite of “indefinitely,” so you can’t say something will “continue
definitely”). If you want to restate those sentences positively, you need to do
a bigger rewrite than just getting rid of the double negatives.
5. Double Negatives
Can Create Parallelism
Further,
Osmankadić highlighted instances in which speakers used double negatives to
embrace parallelism, for example in the line “It was unexpected but not
unwelcome.” That has a nicer rhythm than “It was unexpected but welcome.”
When To Use Double Negatives
To sum up,
double negatives have a long history in English, and used to be commonly used
to add emphasis, but old-time prescriptive grammarians claimed to dislike all double
negatives. Today’s reality lies somewhere in the middle.
Using
phrases like “I can’t hardly wait” and “We don’t need no education” can cause
people to wonder whether you have a decent command of the English language
(although we shouldn’t forget that they are accepted dialect in some regions),
but many people use more subtle double negatives like “It’s not inconceivable,”
“I’m not unhappy,” and “It’s not unusual” to fit the situation or convey rich
meanings. Maybe they’re being polite. Maybe their feelings are between the
positive and negative. Or maybe they don’t know exactly how usual something is.
You need to
be careful with double negatives, but they aren’t always wrong.