"I don't know nothing 'bout birthin' babies!"
I don’t know nothing ’bout grammar. That’s good, because I write a grammar blog. (Well, grammar and other things.)
You might ask, “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?”
That, my friends, is a double negative. What I really said was, “I know something about grammar.”
Pink Floyd sang, “We don’t need no education,” but what they were really saying was, “We do need education” (whether they wanted to or not). The “not” in the contraction cancels out the “no,” resulting in a positive statement.
Usually people use the construction to indicate the opposite, though, like Prissy (Butterfly McQueen) in “Gone with the Wind“: “I don’t know nothing ’bout birthin’ babies!”
So Miss Scarlett was in luck. Yet she wasn’t. You see?
Similar to this concept is a rhetorical device called “litotes.” I’ll tackle that topic in an upcoming post.
Observe and report 