Don't Be Negative About Negatives

Posted: March 02, 2012

[caption id="attachment_9845" align="alignright" width="350"]© iQoncept - Fotolia.com[/caption]A site visitor called attention to a sentence in one of my recent posts and asked, because it has two negatives, whether it is grammatically correct. The sentence in question? “In case you hadn’t heard, I couldn’t care less.”

The reader confused the appearance of two negative words with the concept of the double negative, which is not the same thing. In the sentence I used, each negative is located in a separate clause: Hadn’t appears in the dependent clause, and couldn’t is in the main, independent clause. Therefore, they don’t contradict each other.

But even if they did, would that be wrong? Not necessarily.

Two forms of double negative exist. One, referred to as two negatives resolving to a positive, is also known as litotes (LIE-tuh-tees), a rhetorical device in which emphasis is conveyed by understatement. For example, “I do not disagree,” a form of two negatives resolving to a positive, is an effective way to convey lukewarm concurrence.

“He is not unattractive,” likewise, is not the same as “He is attractive.” By using the double negative, the writer intends to damn with faint praise. The double negative carries the euphemistic connotation that the man in question is only merely pleasant looking rather than handsome.

Read the complete article Don't Be Negative About Negatives.

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Written by Mark Nichol