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Confusing Multiple Negatives: Difference between revisions
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== Film ==
* The page quote is one of several ridiculously elaborate examples spouted by Gingy and Pinocchio in ''[[Shrek]] The Third''.
** [[Fridge Logic|Though "I don't know where he's not" is always a lie]], as you can ''always'' name a place where a given person ''isn't.''
*** [[Fridge Brilliance|Or you can take that to mean]] "I don't know all the places where he's not", giving it a double meaning (knowing as in having visited those places).
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* In ''[[The Vicar of Dibley]]'', Alice memorably breaks into a long discussion about butter, which ends in this convoluted line. It's more subtle by the fact that Alice is [[The Ditz]], yet her whole side of the exchange is perfectly consistent, and the smarter Vicar ends up baffled.
{{quote|'''Alice''': Well, I can't believe the stuff that is not ''I Can't Believe It's Not Butter'' is not ''I Can't Believe It's Not Butter''. And I can't believe that both ''I Can't Believe It's Not Butter'' and the stuff that I can't believe is not ''I Can't Believe It's Not Butter'' are both, in fact, not butter. And I believe... they both might be butter... in a cunning disguise. And, in fact, there's a lot more butter around than we all thought there was.}}
** In another episode, Jim's [[Verbal Tic]] leads him to announce over an intercom that "No no no no no parking is allowed in the upper field." Someone mistakes it for this trope, and asks him for some clarification as to whether or not he can actually park there or not.
* In Al TV, when [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] "interviews" [[Eminem]], he calls him out on a triple negative. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPwBdnknGIs "I don't owe nobody in my family nothin"]
* ''[[That Mitchell and Webb Look]]'' has a scene with a creepy director discussing a nude scene with an actor that gets around to this:
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'''Director''': Well, there are no guarantees in this business, Dan, but if there's one thing I can say, it's that I'll try and avoid being very unsurprised if your penis doesn't not get filmed and put on general release up and down the land. }}
* [[The Daily Show]] [http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-16-2010/mosque-erade parodied] [[Barack Obama]]'s use of convoluted speech thusly: "But let me be clear: There's no way I would not unsupport the kind of project that this isn't."
* In ''[[Once Upon a Time In Saengchori]]'' no one knows what Jo Min Sung is trying to say about Yoo Eun Joo. At all.
* One episode of ''[[Horrible Histories]]'' had a Roman telling an early Christian she'd be hurled trough the air by a trebuchet by saying that the next person to be tortured was "Not not not ''not'' you, so it ''is'' you!"
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You can take what you want 'cuz I don't want nothin'
I'm nothin' if I don't have you }}
* Pretty much the entirety of The Lemonheads' "Style", a sample lyric being "But I don't wanna not get stoned / So I'm not gonna not knock things down".
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* The anti-anti-antidote from the ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'': <small>This is a cup of stuff that will un-un-unpoison you if you get un-unpoisoned.</small>
* In the first ''[[Parappa the Rapper]]'', Cheap Cheap raps that she "ain't got no time for nobody".
* In ''[[Marvel Ultimate Alliance]]'', Thing confuses ''himself''. What he says and what he means are complete opposites.:
{{quote|'''Thing:''' "[The fact that beating up Rhino is fun ([[It Makes Sense in Context|don't ask)]]] don't mean I wouldn't rather have a face that don't look like a gravel road". }}
* ''[[Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People|Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People]]'': When you try to use the lighter on a person, Strong Bad says "I'd love to see him not not on fire, but not not not now.
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** Also Brother Faith from the episode "Faith Off": ''Now correct me if I'm incorrect, but was I told it's untrue that people in Springfield have no faith? Was I not misinformed?''
** And don't forget the chalkboard gag: ''I won't not use no double negatives.''
* ''[[Futurama]]'': In "Roswell that Ends Well," Professor Farnsworth is trying to warn his staff about the twin dangers of [[Temporal Paradox|temporal paradoxes]] and [[Stable Time Loop|stable time loops]]: "Don't do anything that affects anything, unless it turns out you were supposed to do it, in which case, for the love of God, don't ''not'' do it!"
* On ''[[Family Guy]]'', the man with alternating names [[Honest John's Dealership|who's always cheating Peter]] tells him "if you'll just sign this contract without reading it, I'll take your blank check and you won't not be not loving your new timeshare in no time."
* A horror-themed special episode of ''[[All Grown Up!]]'' uses this as a [[Running Gag]] after Tommy [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] it: Somebody tells the gang a ghost story which ends with a few kids wandering out of the forest like they "don't never got no brain or nuthin'."
* That Cajun ferryman from the first ''[[Scooby Doo]]'' movie.
{{quote|"You ain't never caught Big Mona and you ain't never gonna did!"}}
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** It can be more than five for Slavic languages. The following sentence in Polish is perfectly grammatical (and, more importantly, easily parsed by a native speaker), despite being unlikely to be used in this exact form: "Nikt nigdy nigdzie niczego nikomu nie zrobił", and it means "Nobody has ever done anything to anyone, anywhere" (word-by-word translation being "Nobody hasn't never, nowhere, done nothing to no-one". While confusing, it becomes easier when you realise that in Slavic languages, words like "anywhere", "anyone", "anything" are ALWAYS replaced by "nowhere", "no one", "nothing" etc. when used in a negative sentence. The number of negatives is irrelevant, every word needs to be negated - whereas one negative is enough to negate the whole sentence in English.
* Double negatives equating to English single negatives exist in French as well.
* A linguistics professor was lecturing to her class one day. "In English," she said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the class says, "Yeah, ''[[Sarcasm Mode|right]]''."
* [[George Carlin]] told people, "I'm not unwell, thank you," when asked how he was. It usually took them a minute to figure it out.
* Spanish, like the Russian level above, is completely fine with double negatives. For example, the sentence "No té ayudaré nunca" translates literally as "I won't never help you," when it actually means "I will never help you." More than one negative adds emphasis, but it rarely, if ever, goes above two.
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* Italian can have double negatives work as simple negatives as well. Sometimes you can avoid them ("Non c'è nessun problema/Non c'è alcun problema" both mean "There's no problem", but while "nessuno" implicates a negation and works just like "no one", "alcuno" doesn't and is similar to "anyone"); sometimes you can't ("Non vedo nessuno" would literally translate in "I don't see no one", while it actually means "I don't see anyone"). It's quite strange if one thinks that Italian is the direct descendant of Latin, and that Latin counts double negatives as positives: the Latin phrase "sine ulla spe" ("senza alcuna speranza" = "without hope") cannot be written as "sine nulla spe" ("without no hope") because it would radically change its meaning. Italian's use of negatives comes from Vulgar Latin, spoken by peasants ad illiterate people who probably wouldn't bother using the correct rules of the original language. Vulgar Latin became soon an almost independent language much more used than Classical Latin, and so its use of the negative form passed on to modern neo-Latin languages such as Spanish, French ad Italian itself, of course.
* A comparatively simple example from the [[American Civil War]]: Congressman Thaddeus Stevens' "retraction" about something he said about Lincoln's first minister of war, fellow Pennsylvania Republican Simon Cameron (accused of corruption) after Cameron objected: "I said that Cameron would not steal a red-hot stove. I now take that back."
* After NFL quarterback Brett Favre announced his retirement and then changed his mind three years in a row, it became a common joke for sportswriters to predict his next "un-un-retirement" or similar.
* The linguistics blog ''Language Log'' has quite a few posts about "overnegations" and "misnegations" -- sentences where the multiple negatives are so confusing that even the speaker wasn't able to untangle them correctly. [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2981 This] is a good example.
* The word "nonfiction" can be confusing for young children when they first hear it. "Fiction" means "not true," while "nonfiction" means "not not true."
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