Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

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It seems simple when you put it that way. Anode, cathode. Positive, negative. Summer, winter. But things get problematic when the concept of positive and negative gets transferred into the English language.

In particular, it’s negation that seems to fox us, and particularly double negation. This is something that lawyers know about. After all, people have been poking fun at us for generations for using such nice expressions as “not inconsiderable” and “not unreasonable” etc., as though we were skilled enough to nail down that impossibly slim sliver of space between “reasonable” and “unreasonable.” I have to say that you don’t see this sort of thing much anymore, and we’ve pretty much learned to avoid double negatives in drafting statutes: “Use of two or more negatives in a sentence should trigger consideration of an alternative drafting approach,” says the Scottish government on plain language and legislation, for example.

Avoiding overnegation is trickier, though, than simply watching your “nos” and “nots.” Consider these sentences:

“The Skilling indictment demonstrates in no uncertain terms that no executive is too prominent or too powerful and that no scheme to defraud is too complex or too fancy to avoid the long arm of the law.”

“No head injury is too trivial to ignore”

There are at least three negations at work in each, flipping the speaker’s meaning to the opposite of what was intended, thanks to negating terms like “avoid,” “trivial,” or “ignore.” (These are discussed, along with many other examples in posts on the great Language Log; this entry will provide you with many of the links.)

Sometimes, though, a double negation simply gets installed as an idiom, and the valence is understood to be negative even so. So, for instance, I’ll say “I could care less,” when I mean “couldn’t care less”; but no one mistakes my insouciance. (Hmm: three negatives after the semi-colon?) Mentioning valences takes me back to math, where, as I recall, the product of two negatives make a positive. The philosopher, J. L. Austin once riffed on this in a lecture at Oxford, but it’s the heckler, the wry philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, I want you to hear. I’ll let a passage from Morgenbesser’s obituary in the Sunday Times tell the story:

Austin said it was peculiar that although there are many languages in which a double negative makes a positive, no example existed where two positives expressed a negative. In a dismissive voice, Morgenbesser replied from the audience, ?Yeah, yeah . . .?

There. I’ve done a fillip on double negation without once quoting “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 11, 2011 (boomark / email).