Bryson•s Dictionary for Writers and Editors

dos and don’ts / double negatives � 101
dos and don’ts. Not do’s.
Dosewallips River, Washington.
Dos Passos, John. (1896–1970) American writer.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, is the commonest spelling of the name of the
Russian novelist (1821–1881), but there are many possible variants
for both names.
double meanings. Anyone who has written headlines for a living will
know the embarrassment that comes from causing hilarity to a
large group of people by writing an inadvertently two-faced
headline. I have no doubt that someone at the Toronto Globe and
Mail is still cringing at having written “Upturns May Indicate
Some Bottoms Touched” (cited in Punch), as must earlier have
been the author of the oft-quoted and variously attributed
“MacArthur Flies Back to Front.” It is always worth remembering
that many words carry a range of meanings, or function as
both nouns and verbs, and consequently offer unexpected opportunities
for mischief.
double negatives. Most people know you shouldn’t say “I haven’t had
no dinner,” but some writers, doubtless more out of haste than
ignorance, sometimes perpetrate sentences that are scarcely less
jarring, as here: “Stranded and uncertain of their location, the
survivors endured for six days without hardly a trace of food”
(Chicago Tribune). Since hardly, like scarcely, has the grammatical
effect of a negative, it requires no further negation. Make it
“with hardly.”
Some usage guides flatly condemn all double negatives, but
there is one kind, in which a negative in the main clause is paralleled
in a subordinate construction, that we might view more
tolerantly. Evans cites this sentence from Jane Austen: “There
was none too poor or remote not to feel an interest.” And Shakespeare
wrote: “Nor what he said, though it lacked form a little,
was not like madness.” But such constructions must be consid-