You may have been wondering why you should concern yourself with the effects of single negatives when you could so easily pile in with several. And it is true that the ‘double negative’, in particular, has its own potential to cause annoyance—as can be deduced from the heat with which this construction is condemned by our advisers. Simon Heffer, for example, roundly denounces double negatives as ‘offences against logic’, and says that they have ‘no place in civilised writing’. But why? Committed pedants rule that two negatives cancel each other out.** And simply as a matter of good style, Mr Heffer believes, one should express one’s thoughts in a positive form. ‘Why write “no-one is missing” ’, he asks, ‘when one means “everyone is here”?’
The Greeks gave the name ‘litotes’ to the rhetorical figure explained by the OED as that ‘in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary’.** Mr Heffer’s analysis implies that use of litotes is somehow a sign of limp thinking. But if it strikes you that this is to sell nuance short, then you are not far wrong. One would feel concerned for him if, faced with a pair of valentines, one saying, ‘I love you’, and the other, ‘I don’t not love you’, he could really draw no greater distinction between them than that the first was neatly expressed, and the second, not. Even Lindley Murray saw more flexibility in the figure than this, writing that double negatives allow for ‘a pleasing and delicate variety of expression’.**
Just in case his readers remain unpersuaded, Mr Heffer further rules on double negatives that they are ‘unfunny if they attempt to be humorous, arch if they attempt to be anything else’, and again, that if they ‘are an attempt at being funny, they fail’. By these bluff standards, Addison, who in his notes on Paradise Lost ** was not attempting to be funny, must have been being arch (not to mention uncivilised) when he observed that Milton, to avoid shocking his readers with Satan’s impieties, took care to introduce ‘none that is not big with absurdity’. Mr Heffer would require this to be rewritten as ‘only those that are big with absurdity’. But Addison was keen to accentuate the negative—as why not?—and to make Milton’s choice here more explicitly an act of exclusion. Archness had nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile, thank goodness nobody persuaded Laurence Sterne to believe that where double negatives are an ‘attempt’ at being funny, ‘they fail’. In a meandering tale in Tristram Shandy about a parson lending his horse to all comers, we have it explained to us that this fellow ‘was not an unkind-hearted man’. This amusingly cheese-paring form of words turns into a joke of a more disturbing kind when it hits home that, by this expression, the wrong negative quality is being disavowed. The parson, imposed upon on all sides, has generously but weakly lent out his horse so often that it has been ruined by others. He might have been not-unkind-hearted in his relations with those unscrupulous folk whom he helped, but that is not to say that he was unequivocally ‘kind-hearted’: think of the poor horse.
Though Addison’s ‘none that is not big’ is rhetorically distinct from ‘only those that are big’, on bald logic alone, the two phrases lead to the same practical result: either way round, the same absurd examples of Satan’s impieties end up being included in Paradise Lost. There is, however, a use of multiple negatives that defies this stolid analysis. Louis Armstrong gives a beautiful demonstration in his remark that ‘the music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public’.** With litotes, the maths holds up (for instance, ‘not nothing’ would be used to imply ‘something’). But the repeated negatives of Armstrong’s sentence are being used for emphasis (the music is worth absolutely nothing if no audience gets to hear it), making this an example of what linguists call ‘negative concord’.
Mr Heffer remarks that deploying negatives for emphasis in this way ‘is a common feature of vulgar usage’. Confident of his ground, he adds, ‘such forms can safely be regarded as already outside the lexicon of those aiming to write correct English, so we need not trouble ourselves further with them’. Perhaps he should have thought a little harder about the vulgar side of his remark. Lindley Murray supplies the following example of negative concord: ‘I never did repent of doing good, nor shall not now’. Is this outside Mr Heffer’s lexicon? (Murray proposes that the ‘not’ should be replaced with I.) W. E. Henley, meanwhile, author of the poem Invictus—master of his fate, captain of his soul, and the model, after he had a leg removed, for Long John Silver—cheerfully wrote in 1884 in a letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘I shouldn’t wonder if we don’t continue to do a miracle, & pay our expenses’. But perhaps that really was a vulgar thing to say. Back in 1939, in Good and Bad English, Whitten and Whitaker noted, as all who consider this topic must, that even Shakespeare used negative concord in his writing once in a while: ‘Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little, / Was not like madness’ (Hamlet); ‘Nor let no comforter delight mine ear’ (Much Ado about Nothing). But their comment on this was that although ‘the meaning is clear enough’,** still, ‘the illogicality is no longer pardoned’. Pardoned by whom, one dares to wonder, and in what circumstances, then or now? Our Prime Minister, for one, might like to be forgiving. Never mind his education at Eton and Oxford; his distant cousinship of the Queen: on Today, Radio 4, 18 January 2015, he rued a finding that in Britain ‘there are 38,000 Muslim women who really don’t hardly speak any English at all’.
Examples of litotes and negative concord can also be found packed into single words. Shakespeare was sufficiently intrigued by the drama of negative reverses that he decided to coin his own one-word double negative, dropping it into a high-stakes logical argument in The Comedy of Errors. Adriana, addressing her supposed husband (actually, his identical twin), tries to persuade him out of what appears to be infidelity. First she says that if she were stained by her own act of infidelity, he would hate it. Then she says that, as they are one in marriage, even if it is he who is unfaithful, she is no less contaminated by his act. It follows, she argues, that he ought to find her contamination by this means equally—prohibitively—hateful and shameful:
For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I doe digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion:
Keepe then faire league and truce with thy true bed,
Shakespeare’s idea of being undishonoured evidently struck a chord, as the word found a place in the writings of many who came after him. The same cannot be said for Jeremy Bentham’s eye-watering invention, undisfulfilled.**
Undishonoured and even undisfulfilled were both litotical inventions. Of all the disparaged single-word double negatives, however, the reigning queen is irregardless, and this is no doubt in part because it more closely conforms to the mechanics of negative concord. People who loudly love Good English are disgusted by this word—if they even agree that it is one. Kingsley Amis described regardless as having been ‘blown up’ into irregardless through a ‘kind of illiteracy’, with the negative prefix ir- added to regardless in half-baked tribute to irrespective. Even ‘non-pedantic’ Oliver Kamm baulks at it, writing that regardless ‘will do the job precisely’, and that irregardless is ‘unnecessary’ (as though that makes any difference). Logically, goes the desperate argument of the gripers, ir- and -less must cancel each other out, so that if irregardless of has to be used at all, it should at least be used to mean ‘with regard for’, instead of what it is actually used to mean—regardless—the word it simultaneously bastardises and threatens to replace.
Perhaps irregardless sounds to its detractors like a modern invention, typical of our dunderheaded times. It was used in 2006 to what may well have been eye-widening effect by the principal of a grammar school in a written statement submitted to a parliamentary select committee: ‘girls who live at a distance from the school, irregardless of their educational needs, will inevitably be denied access to a grammar school education’. But is irregardless really so new? No. Among other early uses, the following remark was published in 1865: ‘but our Surgeon, irregardless alike of either privilege or regulation …’.**
And as it happens, English has been here before. In his dictionary, Johnson called irresistless ‘A barbarous ungrammatical conjunction of two negatives’. Again, the ‘two negatives’ business by itself is not automatically a problem: Johnson was happy to explain without nasty comments that undisobliging meant ‘inoffensive’. The problem he had with irresistless was that it was being used to mean ‘irresistible’, and not (as logic might be thought to dictate) ‘resistible’, or ‘irresistible—bender’. An eighteenth-century paraphrase of the Song of Solomon written by a forgotten Irish academic demonstrates the sort of use that was getting Johnson down. In a catastrophically bad poem, a line that is given by the Authorized Version of the Bible as ‘Thou hast ravished my heart’ becomes ‘Love, irresistless, has possess’d / With all his Fires, my glowing Breast’.** Was this supposed to suggest ‘love resistible’? No. But that, the Johnsonian gripe implied, was what it did in fact mean.
The OED supplies a single instance of the adverb irrelentlessly, used in 1624 by Richard Montagu, future Bishop of Norwich. Irresistless, from the 1650s on, had a much more successful run. You might like to consider it as a candidate for revival: this would surely cause the gripers acute despair. But if efforts in that direction seem to require too much of you, do at least think of deploying its depraved echo irregardless: this word may have more than a toehold in the language, but it still needs help to secure a firmer place. Superfluous negatives—superfluous according to our advisers—are found all over English usage. Who are the gripers to dictate what everyone else should mean by them? Be brave, stare down your unforbidding** foes, and one of your sallies will undoubtlessly** find its mark.