In this perplexing, 24-hour-news-cycle-reality-show world in which I find myself, I tend to react to current events as if they were background noise that only occasionally comes to the surface of my consciousness. It is a protective mechanism, I am sure. It shields me from constant cognitive dissonance. It keeps my brain from exploding.
Such an re-awakening to the world of news media occurred last week when President Trump said something that made me do a auditory double-take. Nothing unusual in that, I must admit. When it comes to our president or, frankly, to politics in general, I find I am often asking myself, “What? Did I hear that correctly?”
The president was explaining that he misspoke during the recent Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin. In response to a question about Russian interference in the 2016 election he said, “I don’t see why it would be Russia.” The next day, after widespread criticism from all sides he stated, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’” He went on to clarify, “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t’…sort of a double negative.”
That’s the part that caused me to wake up and pay attention. Double negative?
Well, Mr. Trump may be the president of the United States and worth a bazillion dollars and all that, but I am a former English teacher, and as anyone who has ever tried to teach diagramming sentences or reflexive pronouns for a living can tell you: once an English teacher, always an English teacher. I’m still not sure what message Mr. Trump was trying to convey — I’m not sure anyone has yet figured it out — but I can tell you the grammatical error he claims to have made was not a double negative.
Simply put, a “double negative” is a grammatical construction occurring when two forms of negation are used in the same sentence when the purpose is to have a negative meaning. “I don’t know nothing about Russian interference” would be an example. Most double negatives are considered nonstandard constructions because they don’t accurately communicate the message the speaker is trying to convey.
In the above example, the speaker would technically be saying he does know something about Russian interference. The two negations cancel each other to make a positive.
As a rule, English teachers suggest avoiding double negatives in formal speaking and writing. In informal English, though, it is a different story. When Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones’ sing “I can’t get no satisfaction,” only the most uptight schoolmarm would deem this unacceptable and red pencil those lyrics.
And it turns out English does allow for double negatives when used as an understatement. The technical term for this is “litotes.” “I do not disagree” or “I am not unfamiliar with the CIA report” would be examples of this rhetorical device.
As mentioned earlier, in English two negatives in a clause usually make an affirmative. Interestingly, the use of double negatives in the same clause is perfectly acceptable in many languages. These languages use double negatives to intensify the negation. In English we occasionally used this non-standard construction when we say, “I don’t have no problem with that” to emphasis that we really are fine with the situation.
Linguists call this “emphatic negation.” And what do you know? It turns out that Russian is a language that employs emphatic negation. Perhaps this might explain the Helsinki press conference confusion.
