In language, a double negative and a positive are not the same thing.+
This piece is part of a “Keywords” series that I’ve slowly built over the history of The Dispatch. These keywords are tools that help me to think, lenses that let me see with clarity.
Here’s one of my favorites.
Mathematics and human language have different flavors of precision. In math, if I add one and negative one, I get zero. Likewise, a double negative equals a positive. Negative, negative one and one are identical.
That’s not true in human language. If you make a statement to which I respond, “I don’t disagree,” that is not the same thing as saying, “I agree.”
Math sets up a territory within which things are perfectly precise, and it ignores everything outside that territory. If you multiply ten times ten and then subtract one, the answer is 99. But that’s only true if your base is 10. If you are in base six and you multiply 10 by 10 and then subtract one, the answer (converted to base 10) is 59. (Long ago, I got into an argument with a physicist fraternity brother about this, which I’ve described here.)
In human language, we use phrases like “I don’t disagree” to get closer to what we really mean in an efficient way. In other words, there’s not enough of a difference between “I don’t disagree” and “my opinion is not so distinct from yours that I can say I disagree, nor is it so close that I can say I agree” to bother with the longer version.
In classical rhetoric, this double-negative-that-isn’t-a-positive is called “litotes.” Here is a definition from Richard A. Lanham’s useful book, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms:
Litotes (LI to tes; G. “plainness, simplicity) — Antenantiosis; Moderatour
Denial of the contrary; understatement that intensifies, as when a politician once said to his garrulous subordinate, “A period of silence from you would not be unwelcome.” In litotes, “more is understood than is said,” as in “He is not the wisest man in the world” when we mean “He is a fool” (Peacham). Sister Miriam Joseph remarks: “Litotes is related to what the logicians call equipollence or observation, which consists in expressing a thought by denying its contradictory.”
The poet William Wordsworth loved to use litotes to a vexing extent: “not loathe” and “not unwelcome” in The Prelude, for example. Ick.
Litotes is different than the subjunctive case that merely puts things into a doubtful “I don’t want to commit to a statement” place. The journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher, for example, tends to say, “I would agree” rather than “I agree,” which is Swisher protecting herself from committing to a statement.
Although there is precision in litotes, there is power in direct, muscular language. When I am wrong, and I often am (just ask my family), I admit it. “I was wrong, and you were right” or “you were right, and I was wrong” dispel disagreement and move things along.
My ears always listen for litotes because it’s a flag that what looks like a clear statement isn’t. If the object of your affections ever says, “I don’t not love you,” that should translate in your ears to Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
When you hear litotes, pay attention.
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