Here’s an oft-repeated bit of wisdom about English grammar: Double negatives are wrong because two negatives make a positive. So if you say “I don’t have no money,” you’re actually saying you do have money. Right?
Wrong, for reasons that I’ll explain in a moment. But first I want to pull back the curtain on our system for classifying some English usages as mistakes. I’m going to call on two other languages to help us: French and Flemish.
The Nun’s Story, by Kathryn Hulme, is one of my favorite novels, and – I would argue – an extraordinary literary work. Its understated irony makes it one of the rare books that can be read on multiple levels. Hulme’s novel combines the gentle story of a compassionate nun with a stirring account of WWII Belgium, and – hidden beneath the story – an unsparing look at religious principles that have lost their relevance.
Sister Luke, the central character, is a brilliant nurse who grapples with medical emergencies, an occupying foreign army, and archaic convent rules. But today I want to look at some minor characters: the nuns who do the cooking and cleaning. Unlike Sister Luke, who comes from a prominent Belgian family and speaks French, the servant nuns are farm girls who speak Flemish and do the heavy work of scrubbing and washing. Even though the nuns dress alike, their speech instantly identifies their social class.
Fast forward to 2016, and that linkage has disappeared. People who live in the northern half of Belgium proudly speak Flemish not only on farms, but in universities and government buildings.
Of course English-speaking countries have never faced that kind of linguistic divide. There never was a time when educated people spoke French and farm workers spoke English.
Except that there was.
After the Norman Conquest, French became England’s predominant language. Members of the royal family spoke little or no English, even writing their wills in French.
Only uneducated rural workers spoke English, and a simplified version at that. Most verb conjugations and noun declensions were forgotten. For example, plural nouns in Old English used to be a complicated affair, with six possible endings related to gender and grammatical case: -as, -a, -e, -an, -ena, or –um. Over time most of those were simplified to -s and -es. Only a few plural nouns retained a form of their original –ena ending: men, women, children, and oxen. Clearly these were not aristocrats.
And then a strange thing happened: The English language came roaring back, and that truncated grammar became the medium of Milton and Shakespeare. It’s similar to what happened in Belgium, where people in the Flanders region decided that Flemish – once dismissed as coarse and clumsy – was a perfectly suitable language for business transactions, academic work, and government affairs.
Here’s a sobering truth: All our judgments about elegant or coarse language are the result of social conditioning. The posh accents of the British royal family are the result of a geographic accident: As the population of London grew, the language habits of its wealthiest inhabitants became the gold standard for language. If Cornwall had been an important commercial and government center, we would all think that the Cornish version of English (“Where you to?”) was absolutely gorgeous.
Now let’s return to double negatives. (If you’re an English teacher, prepare for a shock.) The usual explanation about two-negatives-make-a-positive is nonsense, for three reasons: English isn’t math, nobody uses double negatives as a positive, and…most important…double negatives are perfectly respectable constructions in many languages (such as Spanish, Persian, and Russian).
So why doesn’t English have a double negative? Surprisingly, it once did. Double negatives (like those long-forgotten conjugations and declensions) used to be standard in Old English.
And now you have the tools to figure out why we cringe when we hear someone use a double negative: Social conditioning. An all-but-forgotten grammatical construction lived on in low-income areas, and it became a sign of limited schooling.
As Eliza Doolittle would say, “Garn!” And – trust me – if the Cockney neighborhood of London had been a high-income neighborhood when the present Queen was born, you and I would be saying “Garn” too. Or – to put it another way – “Location, location, location” is as important to language as it is to the real-estate business.
