There was another thread about double-negatives almost 3 years ago. In my post there I mentioned a sentence with a quadruple-negative that I had to read carefully when I came across it in a newspaper:
There are many examples where a negative is actually an emphatic positive :
There are also examples where a sentence has three or more negatives and does indeed conform to the rule that a negative is intended if and only if the total number of negatives is an odd number. (Am I the only one that sometimes has to stop and actually count the negatives to understand the meaning of such a sentence?) An example, paraphrased, from a N.Y. Times editorial is the sentence:
In a court case brought by environmentalists against the coal mining industry the judge found that the defendant had failed to demonstrate the damage would not be irreversible.affirms the environmental damage.