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.
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.
And they can sometimes get you out of trouble. Take President Donald Trump, who recently blamed his baffling performance alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin on his own accidental use of a double negative. “In a key sentence in my remarks,” Trump said the day after the summit in Helsinki, “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’
The sentence should have been: ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.”
Sort of. A double-negative statement is indeed one that contains two negative elements (e.g., not, no, never, neither and un-). When not used to excuse behavior, it can be employed to intensify the negative meaning of a sentence by heaping negative on top of negative, or to 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 stock market soaring, we can’t invest nothing!” In standard English, we would revise the last clause: “We must invest 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 sang “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.”
Neil Chethik, aka the Grammar Gourmet, is executive director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (www.carnegiecenterlex.org) and author of “FatherLoss” and “VoiceMale.” The Carnegie Center offers writing classes and seminars for businesses and individuals. Contact Chethik at neil@carnegiecenterlex.org or 859-254-4175.