Sheldon and Quadruple Negation

Yay!  A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a newspaper article in the HT messed up a sentence due to too many negative particles and ended up meaning exactly the opposite of what was intended. On the other side of the spectrum is a dialogue from The Big Bang Theory’s latest episode (S05E10, The Flaming Spittoon Acquisition). The moment I heard it, I whooped with excitement—a perfectly executed quadruple negative, I thought, just as Amy pointed it out for the whole world to notice. Let’s have a look at this one!

For those not familiar with TBBT (really?), here’s some background. Sheldon and Amy are friends, and Sheldon has firmly maintained  that Amy is not a girlfriend. Due to what transpires in this episode, Sheldon realizes he doesn’t like Amy going out with other guys, and is made to reassess the nature of their relationship, and this is what he finally says:

Let’s simplify it to show that it indeed boils down to the correct interpretation—

I would not object to us no longer characterizing you as not my girlfriend → I am fine with us no longer characterizing you as not my girlfriend → I think we should stop characterizing you as not a girlfriend → I think you are not “not a girlfriend” → I think you are my girlfriend.1

A beautiful quadruple negative, out of the mouth of none other than our favourite character, Sheldon.

1 A few people feel that this reduction is not logically correct, since “I don’t disagree” is not the same as “I agree”. The point here is that we are looking at the pragmatic information conveyed by the utterance. Since Sheldon is hesitant, he doesn’t want to directly make the bold proposition of asking Amy to be his girlfriend and hence tries to convey it using this negative construction.

For instance, if I say “The Big Bang Theory never fails to amuse”, I would correctly convey the fact that I find TBBT amusing. If I said ““The Big Bang Theory never fails to disappoint”, I would have made the mistake of putting one negative element extra. The second sentence means that “TBBT always disappoints”, which was not my intention.