The problem is that English (for hundreds of years) routinely used double -- even triple negatives in Chaucer's case! -- to state that something was not just in the negative, but emphatically in the negative.

Then some lout decided that these expressions were not "mathematically" correct and should not be used anymore.

Class may have kicked in there; if it began as some posh fad, country folk would be the last to hear of, or adhere to, it.

Slán,

~Fionn

www.geocities.com/children_of_lir