The Friday Fillip
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It seems simple when you put it that way. Anode, cathode. Positive, negative. Summer, winter. But things get problematic when the concept of positive and negative gets transferred into the English language.
In particular, it’s negation that seems to fox us, and particularly double negation. This is something that lawyers know about. After all, people have been poking fun at us for generations for using such nice expressions as “not inconsiderable” and “not unreasonable” etc., as though we were skilled enough to nail down that impossibly slim sliver of space between “reasonable” and “unreasonable.” I have to say that you don’t see this sort of thing much anymore, and we’ve pretty much learned to avoid double negatives in drafting statutes: “Use of two or more negatives in a sentence should trigger consideration of an alternative drafting approach,” says the Scottish government on plain language and legislation, for example.
Avoiding overnegation is trickier, though, than simply watching your “nos” and “nots.” Consider these sentences:
“The Skilling indictment demonstrates in no uncertain terms that no executive is too prominent or too powerful and that no scheme to defraud is too complex or too fancy to avoid the long arm of the law.”
“No head injury is too trivial to ignore”
There are at least three negations at work in each, flipping the speaker’s meaning to the opposite of what was intended, thanks to negating terms like “avoid,” “trivial,” or “ignore.” (These are discussed, along with many other examples in posts on the great Language Log; this entry will provide you with many of the links.)
Sometimes, though, a double negation simply gets installed as an idiom, and the valence is understood to be negative even so. So, for instance, I’ll say “I could care less,” when I mean “couldn’t care less”; but no one mistakes my insouciance. (Hmm: three negatives after the semi-colon?) Mentioning valences takes me back to math, where, as I recall, the product of two negatives make a positive. The philosopher, J. L. Austin once riffed on this in a lecture at Oxford, but it’s the heckler, the wry philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, I want you to hear. I’ll let a passage from Morgenbesser’s obituary in the Sunday Times tell the story:
Austin said it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, “Yeah, yeah . . .”
There. I’ve done a fillip on double negation without once quoting “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
One of my favourite strings of negatives (I can get it up to six with good counting) is from Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, subsection 28(11):
One has to read this in the context of (a) a general prohibition (the first negative) against disclosing (a negative form of a verb but not a negative except for the prohibition), and (b) an exception (second negative) from this prohibition in certain circumstances. Then one hits the bolded further negatives…
Simon – this being Canada, you’d have done equally well with BTO’s “you ain’t seen nothing yet”
DC
One has to distinguish between double or multiple negatives that result in obscurity, such as most of the ones above (though not BTO’s) and ones that qualify or negate a quality that has more than one possible stop in its range.
I think of ‘not unhappy’, which makes good sense as a possible response to ‘how do you feel about X?’. The person who is not unhappy may not be happy either – he/she may be indifferent, resigned, at peace … and the question may be prompted by the possibility that the person might have been unhappy.
There are a number of other such instances where the double negative is acceptable. I don’t claim that all lawyers’ uses are so readily justifiable. One recalls that solicitors were – until the mid-1830s if I recall correctly, which I may not – paid by the word. A lot of stock legal expressions date back to those days.