Hello!
My name is Kevin coming to you from Magoosh and today we're gonna deal with a grammar concept.
Dealing with negative words is something that you'll see in sentence correction questions,
something that might be tested on the test. So let's dive right in, we're talking about negative
words and specifically we're going to get to double negatives and what those are but first just
to be clear negative words uh negate the meaning of other words in the center. So in English we
have words like no and not that can negate verbs nouns um adverbs and we have some other negative
words as well like never, nothing, nobody, and there are more out there. In other languages it can be a
little bit different how negation works, sometimes you're negating verbs or you're using a different
verb ending to show negation but in English we just add the word no or not and things get negated.
One- some couple of tips to say never, nothing, and, no one is fairly emphatic means it's pretty
extreme and very strong and if you want to be strong with your negation then use those words
but sometimes you want things to be a little bit softer. You want to be more gentle and to do that
you can use some of these phrases like, not anybody, or not anything, or not ever, and that's going to
soften uh your statements a little bit. So double negatives are a grammar error it's technically
incorrect informal English to use double negatives although they do pop up and end up in different
places. Ah, in song lyrics in literature in speech even um for different reasons it does have a um
can be a compelling way to convey information it can be kind of funny sometimes, especially
if you use lots of negative words and just kind of like pile them up, but basically the idea is
the similar to multiplication if you multiply two negatives together you get a positive and so
in English if you have two negative words in your sentence it becomes positive. And then if you have
three negative words does it become negative again? If you use four does it come positive again? So
for example good way to see this is with nothing in the sentence says do nothing so that means
don't act don't do anything just stay where you are don't go anywhere it's a one negative word but
if you have two negative words don't do nothing. That means do something you've changed the meaning,
and so that's why sometimes it does end up in speech and why people can use it because it can
be a more compelling way to say something. Instead of saying do something you say don't do nothing um
and I have a literary example here this comes from a song actually the song is called Nobody by Bert
Williams and it says: I ain't never done nothing to nobody and I ain't never got nothing from
nobody no time and so it's much more interesting than saying I've never done anything to anyone
and I never get things from people that's not that exciting um it wouldn't have been such a
memorable song. Anyways moving on in the GMAT uh sentence correction they will test this concept
it will pop up it's not as popular as say like subject verb agreement or a pronoun antecedent
agreement it's not as popular as like some of the idioms like um uh not only but also but it does
end up sometimes in sentences and you got to be on the lookout. So um I took this question from the
GMAT Official Guide the 13th edition question number 21 it says the commission has directed
advertisers to restrict the use of the word natural to foods that do not contain color
or flavor additives chemical preservatives or nothing that has been synthesized any different
color. And so we can see this is the underlined portion of the sentence and we can see we have
a negative word here nothing um but if you go further back in the sentence we have a do not here
at the beginning so we have a double negative here and actually there's a split a 2-2 split between
using nothing or anything. So if you're on point you're paying attention and you know about the
double negatives you'll know that you can't have not in nothing in a sentence it's not going to be
it's not formal English it's something that's not in academic writing so you'd want to eliminate all
answer choices that have nothing and go with the answer choices that have anything in them
and then at that point you have only two answer choices to really work with which makes it a lot
easier. So those are the basics about double negatives when you know you're writing your
college application essay um when you're writing a formal letter you probably don't want to use them
but you know have fun with them with your friends experiment with double negatives
it can lead to some silliness which I always appreciate. So um if you have any questions
about double negatives or any other questions feel free to leave them in the comments below
they'll be at the bottom of my knees probably um be excellent to the universe and i'll see ya!