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I'm not one of those people, but I'll bite on the second part. It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not.

I'm not one of those people, but I'll bite on the second part. It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not. Double negatives in particular make statements harder to reason about. If you can't know if someone means it to be positive or negative in the end (and there are good instances where you need a double negative to mean a positive and can't just restructure easily) then you can't actually know what the person is saying. And I've had plenty of people come back and say they meant the opposite of what I'd assumed from their statement, too. Contrived example: You're explaining a process and say, "You shouldn't get 'no results' here." Since it's spoken, there's no punctuation to help you understand that "no results" is a phrase and is a result in and of itself. You'd just hear "You shouldn't get no results." and may think that an empty result is desired. For the others, if people who know good grammar are reading your work, they're going to be distracted by your bad grammar and have less focus for the actual point of your work. If you're serious about getting something done, that should matter to you. Notice that I keep saying "work", though. In casual conversation, these things don't matter, except to attempt to train people for when they do matter. So mostly they don't matter.

dghf 6y ago
> It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not. Do you mean solely double negatives here, or does this also apply to the three other "rules of grammar"? Because those are not actual rules of grammar at all. The split-infintives "rule" came about by a false analogy with Latin (where it is largely impossible to split infinitives, at least present active ones, because they are almost always single words -- e.g. amare, "to love"): Fowler, for one, holds that a split infinitive is preferable "to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality". The ban on prepositions at the ends of sentences was made up out of whole cloth by Dryden, again with irrelevant reference to Latin. And I think you would be hard pushed to find a writer in the English literary canon who never begins a sentence with a conjunction. > Double negatives in particular make statements harder to reason about. That's bad news for French philosophy, then, because formal French demands a double negative in many contexts. E.g., jamais is French for "never", but "I would never do that" is Je ne ferais jamais ça, where ne is the direct equivalent of the English "not". (In informal French, curiously, the ne is often dropped, or so I understand.) Of course, French is not English, but if Francophones can handle double negatives without logical edifices collapsing, I'm sure Anglophones can too. > You're explaining a process and say, "You shouldn't get 'no results' here." Then any confusion is my own fault for expressing myself in such a clumsy and ambiguous manner. I should have said either "You should get some results here" or "You shouldn't get the message 'no results' here", depending on whether the presence of results or the absence of the error was the key criterion of success.

dghf 6y ago

> It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not. Do you mean solely double negatives here, or does this also apply to the three other "rules of grammar"? Because those are not actual rules of grammar at all. The split-infintives "rule" came about by a false analogy with Latin (where it is largely impossible to split infinitives, at least present active ones, because they are almost always single words -- e.g. amare, "to love"): Fowler, for one, holds that a split infinitive is preferable "to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality". The ban on prepositions at the ends of sentences was made up out of whole cloth by Dryden, again with irrelevant reference to Latin. And I think you would be hard pushed to find a writer in the English literary canon who never begins a sentence with a conjunction. > Double negatives in particular make statements harder to reason about. That's bad news for French philosophy, then, because formal French demands a double negative in many contexts. E.g., jamais is French for "never", but "I would never do that" is Je ne ferais jamais ça, where ne is the direct equivalent of the English "not". (In informal French, curiously, the ne is often dropped, or so I understand.) Of course, French is not English, but if Francophones can handle double negatives without logical edifices collapsing, I'm sure Anglophones can too. > You're explaining a process and say, "You shouldn't get 'no results' here." Then any confusion is my own fault for expressing myself in such a clumsy and ambiguous manner. I should have said either "You should get some results here" or "You shouldn't get the message 'no results' here", depending on whether the presence of results or the absence of the error was the key criterion of success.