LINGUISTICS
Why Your Double Negative Pet Peeve Is Irrational
A case study in linguistic prejudice and grammatical ignorance
It is fashionable to have “language pet peeves.” Perhaps because to opine on some common turn of phrase, or common spelling error, is a way of signaling education, intellect, or class, among many other things.
A popular pet peeve is an aversion to the double negative in English. You’re supposed to say I can’t get any satisfaction, but not I can’t get no satisfaction, since two negative words (can’t and no) cancel each other out, resulting in a positive. But let’s face it, we all know what the Rolling Stones meant in (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
Double negative pet peevers typically justify their complaint via an appeal to logic, or math. In logic, two negatives make a positive, and in math, the product of multiplying two negative numbers is positive.
Such pet peevers are guilty of an egregious category error. Human language is not an artificially created mathematical or logical representational system. Instead, it is a naturally occurring system of communication, specific to humans, which encodes meaning in linguistic utterances.
This is not to say that we cannot use logic and math to represent the structure of…
