Nerd alert!

Here's a post wherein I will not talk about Brandi Carlile at all. I promise.

Do you know what grammatical rule I love to flout (other than splitting infinitives)? (Also, did you know that apparently people confuse the words flout and flaunt quite often? I find that bizarre, but it's true. It says so in this book I have of commonly confused words.) No double negatives. I am kind of in love with double negatives these days, and you know what? They were all the rage in English until, like, um the sixteenth or seventeenth century when somebody decided that language had to be like math, in which two negatives make a positive. While that is true in math, there is no need for it to be true in language. In fact, it is not true in any of the romance languages, so what is up, English? If the sentence was meant to be negative, every related word in the sentence would be negative. Like so, "I do not have no eggs." Or, really, "I have not no eggs," because when they were using double negatives in English, they didn't use the verb do to form negatives like we do now. Even better, you could say something like this, "I never have not no eggs." Maybe--that sounds horrible--but you could get sentences with triple or quadruple narratives, I swear. I'll dig one up from Chaucer some day, just you wait. And I'll reproduce it Middle English and then attempt to translate it myself, which could be ludicrously easy or deceptively difficult.

(Do we miss the girl crush talk yet?)

Basically, I really only use double negatives in my head to say things like, "I ain't got no money" or whatever, because that sounds tough. In my head. And it's fun. If you said that it Spanish--no tengo ningun dinero--it would be doubly negative, but it would also be grammatically correct. Who changed this rule in English and why? I blame the scientific revolution/the great enlightenment/the renaissance perhaps. Those are all different time periods, I realize, but it happened during one of them.

Also, I think I only enjoy double negatives when I'm already using grammatically suspect structures, like "ain't" or "don't got." Like, "I don't got no time for this, fool." Like I'm Mr. T or something. Once again, these things only happen in my head. But I think they're fun. And English is not math, so two negatives shouldn't make a positive.