We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the class room
Teachers leave those kids alone
– From the rock opera, “The Wall,” 1979
When Pink Floyd performed these lyrics, the band wasn’t worried about making English teachers happy. In fact, the double negatives in the first two lines (”don't need no”) were songwriter Roger Waters’ protest against rigid education.
In your schooling, you may have been told never to use a double negative statement. Don’t always pay attention to this. Double negatives may not be Standard English, but when used judiciously, they can be good writing.
What is a double negative statement? It’s one that contains two negative elements (e.g., not, no, never, neither, and un-). Its intent may be to 1) intensify the negative meaning of a sentence by heaping negative on top of negative, or 2) make a positive statement by employing two negative elements that cancel each other out.
Pink Floyd went for the intensifying effect. By claiming that “we don't need no education,” Waters took his point beyond grammar: Inflexible education leads to thought control, he was saying. Encourage creativity — or “leave those kids alone.”
Double negatives can be clarifying too. For example, one might say, “With the economy tanking, we can’t do nothing!” In Standard English, we would revise the last clause: “We must do something!” But by using a double negative, we emphasize that now, we are doing nothing — something we should not continue.
Be careful with double negatives, however. When Al Jolson said, “You ain't heard nothin’ yet,” we knew we were going to hear something soon. But what did the late Cincinnati Reds Manager Sparky Anderson mean when he spoke thusly about the resilience of baseball? “We try every way we can to kill the game, but for some reason, nothing nobody does never hurts it.”
Is that clear? Not hardly.
Neil Chethik, aka the Grammar Gourmet, is executive director at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (www.carnegieliteracy.org) and author of FatherLoss and VoiceMale. The Carnegie Center offers writing classes and seminars for businesses and individuals. Contact Neil at neil@carnegiecenterlex.org or (859) 254-4175.