What's the Deal with Double Negatives in English?

The trouble with double negatives started with the standardisation of English. Before the invention of the printing press and widespread literacy, nobody really cared that much about “proper usage”. Different counties and, indeed, even villages often spoke their own dialects of English and, as almost none of it was written down, the grammar police had very little to charge people with. And so, for centuries, double negatives remained a part of everyday life. You can even find it in the work of writers such as Chaucer and Shakespeare – to show how widespread this supposed mistake is.