> 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 ap

> 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.