Double negation

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here, I don’t mean the double negation that’s common to people with too little education but rather to people with too much of it.

Two examples:

  1. “We claim that the legal categories of “physical” and “emotional” harm are not unrelated to the gender of the victims.”

  2. “it was not abnormal for pregnant women to suffer such responses”

How does it work? Does the rule “two negatives equal a positive” apply or does it lead to a different conclusion?

What is the purpose of double negation in such cases?

2

It’s not unusual to use this form of double negation - it provides a different meaning that isn’t at either extreme, and is sort of noncommital.

If give you a gift-wrapped box and it turns out to contain a million dollars, you’d be happy. If it contains a dog turd, you’d be unhappy. If it contains a bag of rice, you might say “Well, I’m not unhappy with it, but I expected something a bit more exciting”

3

I agree - for instance I think if you’re pregnant and having weird physical symptoms there’s a world of difference between “normal” and “not abnormal”. The former would apply to, say, morning sickness, and the latter to the uncontrollable urge to eat kitchen sponges.

On the other hand, it’s probably a form of expression that’s badly overused in academic language. The first example may be a borderline case. I guess a good test of whether a double negative is necessary is whether it adds genuine meaning that would be lost in a plain positive statement. Another good test is whether your eyes glaze over when reading it :stuck_out_tongue:

4

Double negation is a very old rhetorical device; its formal name is “litotes”. Litotes is a form of understatement: “I’m not unfamiliar with the works of Cicero” has usually a different connotation to it’s seemingly logical equivalent “I’m familiar with the works of Cicero”.