Have you ever heard the song “Ain't No Mountain High Enough”? Or heard the phrase, “ain’t nobody got time for that”? If so, you’ve come across every English teacher’s arch nemesis: the double negative.

Most of us who teach English have a fit when we hear the double negative. But for once, let’s hold our horses! For much of history, the double negative was actually the norm.

Today, we’ll take a look at two aspects of English grammar that were once shockingly different, and discuss what historical forms of English mean for us today!

The Double Negative

Did you know that Shakespeare used the double negative? Here’s a line from a play from 1593:

I never was, nor never will be.

In fact, Shakespeare even used triple negatives. Here’s a line from another play:

I have one heart, one bosom and one truth, 
And that no woman has; nor never none 
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

Two centuries earlier, Chaucer had also used a triple negative in his Canterbury Tales. The “nas” in the sentence below is like “never was.”

Curteis he was and lowely of servyse. 
Ther nas no man nowher so vertuous.

In fact, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, a scholar of Old English shares, "I came across some beautiful examples of people actually `correcting' single negation to double negation at that time!"

So when did all this change?

Well, the 18th century saw a rise of grammar guides, perhaps the most famous one being Lindley Murray's English Grammar. To get an idea of how influential it was, just know that this guide was respected by writers like Charles Dickens and Edgar Allen Poe!

Anyways, guides like these often used Latin grammar as a model for English, and this is how the Latin rule that "double negatives make a positive" entered the English language.

Word Order

Nowadays, we take for granted that the basic structure of an English sentence is SVO ([subject] + [verb] + [object]). Modern English (1500-present) has a fixed word order and that word order is responsible for showing the relationships between the words.

This means that if we change the word order in a sentence, its meaning changes too. For example, “Bob ate eggs” means something totally different from “Eggs ate Bob.”

However, English a millennium ago wasn’t as simple. Old English had a more flexible word order, because it could rely on word endings to show the functions of the words.

So while the verb usually came somewhere in the middle of the sentence, the subject and object could float around it, as long as they had the proper word endings. In other words, “Bob ate eggs” could easily have been “Eggs ate Bob” (“Eggs[+object ending] ate Bob[+subject ending].”

By early Middle English (1100 to 1500), English word order had lost much of its flexibility, most likely due to long-term exposure to speakers of Celtic languages. However, some of Old English remains with us today in sentences with negative adverbials.

Never have I seen such a rainy day.
Not only did he lie, but he also stole from us.

In the word order that’s more standard these days, these sentences would be:

I have never seen such a rainy day.
He not only lied. He also stole from us.

📌 Takeaways

But what does all this mean for those of us who teach?

Well, this certainly drives home the fact that English has evolved a lot through the ages and what we consider “proper grammar” wasn’t always the standard! And I don’t know about you, but these changes make me wonder what will be considered “proper grammar” a millennium from now.

But back to teaching. Needless to say, students who plan to take standardized exams should still try to master “proper” grammar.

But if they simply want to get by, we can advise them to stick to grammar patterns that are easier for them to produce as long as they are intelligible. After all, it’s more important that they get their thoughts across than sticking to “proper grammar” that might change in a few hundred years anyway. 😎

Personally, I’ve also found it useful to tell students that they sound like Shakespeare when they make word order mistakes: “Hmm, Shakespeare might have said that.” It’s definitely more fun than saying, “Good job, but this is better!” and it definitely makes for a good laugh! Happy tutoring!