Double Negatives

   "Don't use double negatives," said the grammar teacher, "because two negatives make a positive."
   "But that's only true in algebra," said the math teacher.
   "And some languages require double negatives," said the French teacher.
   "Sometimes repetition for emphasis is useful," the editor pointed out.

   All this comes to mind as the president of the United States tried to walk back his rejection of the charge that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
   Recordings of the comment have the president clearly saying, "I don't see why it would be," as he accepted Vladimir Putin's denial that Russia interfered in the election process, overruling the unanimous agreement of U.S. intelligence agencies that it did.
   But after a torrent of outrage from Americans that Donald Trump appeared to be in Putin's pocket, Trump insisted he had inadvertently left out the ending "-n't" from the word "would," so the sentence really should have been "I don't see why it wouldn't be," adding that it was "sort of a double negative."
   Except that in the context of the rest of the statement, this particular sentence makes no sense, and to suggest that the two negatives somehow make a positive makes even less sense.
   Double negatives are common in many dialects of English, and to condemn their use is only to say that some dialects have more prestige than others. But that is a social judgment. Linguistically, all dialects are equal, because they enable their speakers to communicate easily.
   Finally, all this is an example of the standard complaint by politicians, when caught saying something egregiously wrong, of insisting, "What I really meant was ..."
   Doesn't work. Video machines record what you say, and journalists report what you say. If you meant something else, you should have said something else.