There we sat in a vegan cafe, munching on something that hadn’t originated on land but could neither be called seafood. I didn’t ask. My buddy Harry sat across from me, enthusiastically opining on the impact of the upcoming gubernatorial contest on the reelection of Donald Trump.
“I think if we took a poll,” Harry was saying, “we’d find that just about everybody who’s voting for our misbegotten governor is voting for Trump.”
“And vice versa,” I pointed out.
“They identify with them both, and of course our governor and Trump identify with each other.” He shook his head. “The poor fools!”
“No one who isn’t a fool doesn’t think Trump is,” I replied.
Two men in trench coats appeared behind me, standing on either side. One flashed a badge.
“O’Halloran, sixth precinct,” he said, “Double Negative division. Mr. Robinson, you’re under arrest. Come along quietly.”
“On what charge?” Harry demanded. The guy’s a true friend.
“Reckless double-negation,” O’Halloran replied, “at least ten counts.”
The cop was keeping his voice low, but this was a vegan diner, after all. Up to this moment, Harry and I had been the loudest people in the place. Everyone could hear the cop, and cell phones were popping out and beginning to live-stream the proceedings.
The other cop tried to hurry things along. “You have the right to remain positive-”
“Hang on a second!” Harry interrupted. “Ten counts? He used three negations, not ten!”
O’Halloran reached down and picked up the decorative planter in the middle of our table. Among the tarragon and cilantro sprigs was a cleverly-hidden microphone.
“We’ve been listening since the two of you sat down,” O’Halloran said, consulting a notepad in one hand. “We’ve got you saying to your friend here, ‘I think you were not wrong in not saying that,’ ‘ I never don’t think about it,’ and ‘I don’t not like tofu.’
“That’s still only nine negations, across four sentences,” Harry pointed out.
“We’ll let the D.A sort that out. Cuff him, Corrigan.”
“This is entrapment!” I protested.
“Well, no,” Harry chimed in, “entrapment would be if they’d been standing behind us in line when we were ordering and they had said everyone who votes for the governor is voting for Trump.”
I blinked. “Thank you, Mister Helper.”
“Strictly speaking, those aren’t all double negatives,” a young lady with purple hair offered from a nearby table. “A proper double negative isn’t so much two usages of a single form of negation in a single sentence as the use of two different forms of negation in a sentence which cancel each other out.”
Her companion nodded. “Something along the lines of ‘I can’t find my keys nowhere!”
“This is what I’m saying.”
“Ma’am, I’ll have to ask you both to pipe down, or we’ll have to take you in as well.”
“Well, she’s right,” said a tattooed server behind them. “If one says something like, ‘I ain’t got no time for dessert,’ the net semantic outcome is, ‘I’ve got time for dessert...’”
“...whereas this man’s original assertion about Trump, ‘No one who isn’t a fool doesn’t think Trump is,’ yields a net semantic outcome of ‘People who are not fools think Trump is a fool.’ Equivalence!” The purple-haired lady nodded.
“She’s right,” Harry quietly assured me. “The D.A. will never make non-equivalence.”
“Well, now, wait a bit,” chimed in a balding, bearded older gentleman with thick glasses from behind his newspaper, “We are not allowing for semantic redundancy.”
“How do you mean?” asked the waiter.
“Consider the statement, ‘Alfie says he has not seen neither Betty nor Cassandra all day.’ In such an instance, neither is semantically inconsequential; we are inclined to say the sentence contains a double negative, yet it means the same thing even if we remove the neither.” Everyone nodded.
“And then there’s semantic ambiguity,” noted the shift manager, whose neatly-groomed mohawk shimmered as she passed a hanging lava lamp. “If I were to say, ‘You can’t not not say you didn’t,’ I might be saying, ‘You can’t say you didn’t,’ or I might alternately mean ‘You can say you did.’ We’ve entered the realm of propositional calculus, where we must formalize both our terms and usage to produce a cogent argument.”
The cops stared.
“I’m just saying, Do we call it a double negative if we can’t clearly demonstrate non-equivalence?”
Corrigan turned to his partner. “Should we call for backup?”
“This may not be entrapment, but it is certainly illegal surveillance,” Harry protested. “This isn’t Kaliningrad! You can’t just go around randomly bugging people!”
O’Halloran grinned. “Nothing random about it. Robinson here’s been on our radar for quite some time. This one's by-the-book.”
“Oh, yeah?” Harry replied in anger. “Got a warrant?”
“You’re a slippery one, Robinson,” O’Halloran snickered, pulling the warrant from inside his coat, “but we’ve had our eye on you. Does your pal here know about your priors?”
My face went red with shame. Harry, a true pal, brushed the implication aside.
“You can’t do this!” he objected.
“Pal, we can’t not do this,” O’Halloran replied.
The café erupted in protest. “Abuse of power!” “Police brutality!”
“We ain’t never had one this big,” Corrigan whispered to his partner.
“Citizen’s arrest!” cried Harry, standing up as confrontationally as he could.
Corrigan suddenly put his hand to his ear.
“Jim, we got a 14-30 at the mall!” he said to O’Halloran, “Dangling Modifier spree in the food court! They need us right away!”
O’Halloran backed away from me with a scowl. “We’re not not unfinished here, Robinson,” he said with eyes narrowed.
“I would hope you didn't not see what I just did,” Harry said, sitting back down with a sigh of relief.
“I sure didn’t not see it!” I said, exhaling at length.
The bearded gentleman winked supportively at me and went back to his paper. The shift manager touched my shoulder reassuringly.
“I do not think you are not in the right here,” she said kindly, “I cannot not agree with you!”
I nodded my appreciation with a grim smile.
“Whatever you may have double-negated in the past, you know your slate’s clean with me,” Harry said comfortingly. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I can’t not think about it,” I confessed mournfully.
Harry picked up the check, Zeus bless him, and we were away. I took a look behind me, watching the occupants of the vegan café returning to their more tranquil norm, embracing the take-home point of the whole sordid encounter:
Double negatives are a no-no.
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