triple negative...

Posted Jan 30, 2026 6:17 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
In reply to: triple negative... by GhePeU
Parent article: Open source for phones: postmarketOS

There's an old joke which I know I won't get exactly right, and it's a joke, another guarantee it will not be exactly right.

A professor is pontificating on double negatives and mentions that some languages do allow them to mean a single positive, but no language allows double positives to turn into a negative. From the back of the classroom, some anonymous voice calls out, "Yeah, right."

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 3:24 UTC (Mon) by Heretic_Blacksheep (subscriber, #169992) [Link] (8 responses)

Had a bit of chuckle at that. That's great, I'll have to remember it. Another joke on English teachers everywhere that endlessly harped about kids using "ain't" (or aint) - means 'am not' or just a negative for those not familiar with Americanisms. "'Ain't' isn't a word/in the dictionary!" It's now not only in most American English dictionaries, it's also in the one dictionary nearly every international scholar considers authoritative: Oxford's English Dictionary. You know, that dusty old book in most Anglophone libraries, and probably some bigger non-Anglophone libraries, on its own lectern in the reference section that's bigger than a tenured professor's ego. (Not only is it in there, it lists variants of aint and ain't going back to Old English!) I greatly irritated a Brit by pointing that out just two weeks ago! ;) FWIW, Oxford's English Dictionary can also be referenced online at OED.com.

Also mildly amusing, Firefox's spell checker tags aint as misspelled (it's not, it can be spelled either way, with or without an apostrophe) but doesn't tag ain't.

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 4:42 UTC (Mon) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (3 responses)

Now you made me curious.

aint -- flagged
ain't -- accepted
wont -- accepted, but maybe as used in "as was his wont"
won't -- accepted
didnt -- flagged
didn't -- accepted
shant -- flagged
shan't -- accepted
isnt -- flagged
isn't -- accepted

I wonder why "aint" is accepted without the contraction's apostrophe.

Here's another phrase you might like: "It don't make me no never mind." My Texas aunt had never heard it but really liked it, and her speech was peppered with similar cornpone phrases. How that ever came to be a phrase, I don't know, but I stopped trying to figure out how many negatives it was. Google found lots of explanations that it means "I don't care" but none of them add the hint of exasperation I have always heard. "I don't care, just make a decision!" or "I don't care, stop worrying about it."

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 8:58 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> I wonder why "aint" is accepted without the contraction's apostrophe.

Because it isn't a contraction? (technically, it can't be, because it contains an 'a')

But also maybe just because it's an irregular verb?

Mine, yours, its ...

And here I was about to say "amn't, aren't, aint" ... and suddenly realised "hey, maybe aint is just the irregular negative conjugation of the irregular verb 'to be'". After all, that's the way it's normally used ...

Cheers,
Wol

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 11:27 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Why does "a" ban a contraction? I have heard shan't ("shall not", perhaps should be "sha'n't" :P ), what'll (verbal at least, could be a colloquialism), what'd (again, verbal…might not be spelled this way). I also remember surprising a teacher in high school that "it'll" is in the dictionary.

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 11:46 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Why does "a" ban a contraction?

Because "isn't" doesn't contain an a? It can't lose an a if it hasn't got one to lose :-)

That's what made me think it's an irregular form, not a contraction.

Cheers,
Wol

triple negative...

Posted Feb 2, 2026 13:40 UTC (Mon) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> Also mildly amusing, Firefox's spell checker tags aint as misspelled (it's not, it can be spelled either way, with or without an apostrophe) but doesn't tag ain't.

Firefox's default en-US dictionary (https://searchfox.org/firefox-main/source/extensions/spel...) appears to be based on SCOWL with size 60, where:

> The normal (non-large) dictionaries correspond to SCOWL size 60 and, to encourage consistent spelling, generally only include one spelling variant for a word. The large dictionaries correspond to SCOWL size 70 and may include multiple spelling for a word when both variants are considered almost equal. The larger dictionaries however (1) have not been as carefully checked for errors as the normal dictionaries and thus may contain misspelled or invalid words; and (2) contain uncommon, yet valid, words that might cause problems as they are likely to be misspellings of more common words (for example, "ort" and "calender").
(http://wordlist.aspell.net/hunspell-readme/)

i.e. it's choosing to err on the side of rejecting some correct words, rather than accepting more incorrect words, which seems sensible for a spellchecker. (The user can always ignore the checker if they think they know better, or install a different dictionary.)

In this case, the Google Books 1980-2008 dataset says "aint" has a frequency of 0.0049 per million, which scores 1 out of 5 on the "should include" scale, and is several times less common than non-words like "anit" and "ainst" (http://app.aspell.net/lookup-freq?words=aint).

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/aint suggests some "references in classical literature", but I compared a few against early publications on archive.org: some appear to be OCR errors (the printed version says "ain't"), some appear to be typos (they use "ain't" more often than "aint" in the same edition, and later editions tend to regularise on "ain't"), and some are using deliberate misspelling to depict characters who can't speak or write properly, so genuine uses are even rarer.

Given that evidence, I think aint ain't correct.

triple negative...

Posted Feb 3, 2026 13:35 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

There's also "amn't", which some people seem never to have heard, but is fairly common in Ireland (apparently also has use in Scotland, but IME that's more an "am-nae").

triple negative...

Posted Feb 3, 2026 15:12 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> (Not only is it in there, it lists variants of aint and ain't going back to Old English!) I greatly irritated a Brit by pointing that out just two weeks ago! ;)

Bear in mind, the "official" English dictionaries cast the language in aspic round about the late 1700s/early 1800s (Dr Johnson et al) when London was going through a very francophone phase. And modern English is very much descended from that.

It very much annoys me when people go on about "correct" and "incorrect", seeing as what they usually complain is incorrect very much predates these new-fangled "french" dictionaries. (Having a standard on the other hand, referring to modern English as *standard* English I have no trouble with whatsoever, as long as you don't demand it's the only true English.)

Cheers,
Wol

triple negative...

Posted Feb 3, 2026 15:21 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I like the discussion that followed my post! Yes, many Americanisms are actually old English. Fowler had this to say about using Americanisms in English (in The King's English, 1908):

[in context of "I guess"] I gesse is a favourite expression of Chaucer’s, and the sense he sometimes gives it is very finely distinguished from the regular Yankee use. But though it is good old English, it is not good new English. If we use the phrase—parenthetically, that is, like Chaucer and the Yankees—, we have it not from Chaucer, but from the Yankees, and with their, not his, exact shade of meaning. It must be recognized that they and we, in parting some hundreds of years ago, started on slightly divergent roads in language long before we did so in politics. In the details of divergence, they have sometimes had the better of us. Fall is better on the merits than autumn, in every way: it is short, Saxon (like the other three season names), picturesque; it reveals its derivation to every one who uses it, not to the scholar only, like autumn; and we once had as good a right to it as the Americans; but we have chosen to let the right lapse, and to use the word now is no better than larceny.

I vaguely remember he has amusing things to say about over-use of litotes too, but can't find it at the moment.