Ioa, as ever, you’ve been of great help.
Thanks
Mark
You’re welcome; good luck snagging one in HK.
Not being of no help is something that isn’t developed with no effort.
While not being helpful is requires no effort, not finding exceptions to the double negative rules is not difficult.
I am not sure what the “technical term” is for that, but the amazing ways that one can twist english to violate it own “rules” continues to offer me hours of amusement. Mr X can you imagine the hell my teachers endured?
Don’t even get me started on math and physics.
Younger and dumber version of you was actually right … the double negative is standard in many many languages and many, many natural, regional dialects of English and was standard in standard English — double standards are deliberate! 
— until the idiot grammarians of the 17th Century got hold of things. To them, the only logical, perfect language was Latin, spoken in heaven, therefore any language that differed from Latin must be illogical and wrong. In Latin, you simply can’t have a double negative, so double negatives must be wrong, therefore the rule must be that a double negative in English is wrong.
Did you ever wonder where that idiot rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition came from? It’s impossible to have a preposition at the end of a sentence in Latin, that’s where!
Old story of aged English professor, now going blind, getting his housekeeper to read to him every evening. One evening, he chose a chapter out of a particularly abstruse book. Having struggled through the reading, the housekeeper ended, saying “What did you choose a book like that to be read to out of for?” The prof. had an immediate heart attack and died! 
I may be old-fashioned, formal and professorial in my manner and language — to the point, it seems, that a few years back there was a rumour that spread round the campus and then out into the city that I am a member of the aristocracy! Actually I’m the grandson of a coal-miner and an engineer in a vegetable-canning factory — but I do not believe in those so-called rules!
Mr X
Mr X: Is your desired configuration available at the apple store you plan to go to (I’m assuming it’s an apple store…)? I once wanted to just run in a pick up my MB Pro with a larger hard drive and more memory, but they only had the configurations you find on the website before you adjust for upgrades.
Wait a minute. The MA 11" with 1.4GHz and 128GB SSD is $US1200 and the MA 13" with a 1.8GHz and 128GB SSD is $US1300. The difference in processor cost is more than that. They must be getting one heck of a deal on those 13" displays that they are using for everything.
So given that, it really comes down to how “portable” you need to be…
BAH!
No … same thing, I’ll have to find a way of booking it 3 days in advance — that’s the delivery time the website gives with the memory upgrade — but to pick it up when I’m there. And I presume that, even in this part of the world, three days means three working days, so I couldn’t get there early on Friday and then pick it up on Monday before coming back to Xiamen.
Actually it’s not the same screen in the 13" MBA (1440 x 900) and the 13" MBP (1280 x 800), so I’ve no idea about the financing side of things. But yes, it does come down to portability … and as I say, knowing the extended battery life in the 13" would mean I really wouldn’t have to carry the power-pack with me so much as with the 11" makes it a matter of 3 oz difference in weight. Yes it’s not so dinky, but while that makes the 11" alluring, given my history, so to speak, dinkiness is not as major an issue as weight.
Mr X
The “no double negative” also shows up as a result of binary logic. Not Not P is equivalent to P. So if you say, for example “I didn’t not go to the store”, that is logically equivalent to “I did go to the store” (if you accept “go to the store” as something with only two truth values).
Not that this is an attempt to be prescriptive about it. But there is some rationality to considering it weird.
Though casual dialect and non-English languages obviously ignore this. Oh well 
“You cannot not consider this” has a precise meaning to me. This is a structure (“cannot not” = “on ne peut pas ne pas”) you often use in French, especially in philosophy studies…
More generally, French language ignores logic…
I have no head, hence no logic center. Perhaps I should learn french.
Out of curiosity, what does it mean? We never got that far in my French classes (the teachers would often deny that there was any negation aside from ne … pas , and I was like "But I’ve seen ne … jamais! (One of my history textbooks even had a famous quote in French: “Ne jamais plus la guerre”, “Never again war”, which was said post-WW2 by…DeGalle, I think? It’s been a decade)). The linguist in me wants to knooooow.
And French’s way of negating is different enough from English that it doesn’t need to feel constrained to the same strange rules of logic that have bound English over the past however many years.
Though, I confuse people when I assume things are not two-valued while they do: “I do not dislike this meal” is not equivalent to “I like this meal”, because “like” is not two-valued, it is (at least) three-valued: to dislike, to neither dislike nor like, to like. I am simply stating that it is not the first category. Once I explained it to my wife, she stopped getting offended when I was simply neutral on a lot of the foods she cooked…
A sidenote: in one of my logic classes, my professor while discussing the relationship between languages and logic, said something to the effect of “In every language I know of, putting two things next to each other is doing an ‘and’ against them. ‘The book, the cup of tea…’ for instance”, and I was like “Actually, Japanese is kind of weird. If you do that, it can be an ‘or’ relationship: ‘hon, ocha…dochi ga ii desu ka?’”. So in short, different languages are different.
So what you are saying, if I may be so bold as to paraphrase and interpret, is that you had to explain to a professor that
Education is so over rated sometimes.
We were actually discussing the logical operators and expressing them in English. It’s not his fault for not being aware of an odd idiosyncrasy in Japanese. (In most languages that I know of, after all, concatenation implies conjunction)
Of course, I also thought that class was one of the good ones I took in college, but I’m a math/logic/philosophy-of-those nut, and that’s pretty much what the class was.
“Jamais plus la guerre” was a sentence French people used to say after World War 1, because pacifist movements were very powerful. They stopped using it when World War 2 seemed inevitable in the 1930s…
“ne… pas” is the equivalent of “not”.
“ne… plus” is the second type of negation, but it is more complicated. It can mean “not… any more” or “no longer”, but it can also mean “no more”, or even a more complicated negation: “I’ve got no money left” is “Je n’ai plus d’argent”. But if you say “I’ve got no time to do this”, you use “ne… pas” ! (“Je n’ai pas le temps de faire cela”.) I don’t see any logic behind this…
“ne… jamais” means “never”, and “jamais” without the negation (“ne”) means “ever”.
“ne… plus jamais” or “ne… jamais plus” (but you can’t use either indifferently, it depends on the sentence… again, no grammar rule for that) is a variation of “ne… plus” with a subtle difference of sense: you should no longer do something, forever.
“ne… pas” sometimes means “neither” as well, because you can say “Je n’aime pas ceci ni cela” or “Je n’aime ni ceci ni cela” (“I like neither this nor that”; for this one you’re free to use the one you prefer!)
Now that you have a headache, you can deduce that French language has no logic for a lot of constructions and is therefore very difficult to master. In elementary school you have to learn many lists of exceptions to grammar rules, but a lot of French people don’t know all these exceptions (in fact, everybody doesn’t know all the exceptions, we know the most common ones). Most of the time you know how it works because you know you have to say it this way, not because you know that the common rule says that but in this case it is an exception.
You know, that just might work for me. in only speak red-neckian which pretty much seems to follow the same rule as french based on the above. The rule is: there are not rules, only suggestions.
From what I recall, French was rife with exceptions to rules, but at least the exceptions tended to have their own rules. (One that I vaguely recall was that -ir verbs conjugate like this, except for the -oir verbs, which conjugate like this, except for the -voir verbs, which are like this…, or something to that effect). Which is better than English.
Though most native speakers of English can’t speak their own language right a lot of the time, it seems. But I’m a cranky curmudgeon when it comes to my own language. Yes, it’s complicated and makes no sense. Yes, there’s no logic to it. Yes, you should still speak it correctly anyway. Grumble grumble. Ignore me, I’m just cranky.
I seem to recall most of those, though we never delved into that many different negations.
So what does “On ne peut pas ne pas…” mean? Or rather, what does it imply about the activity? (For example, “On ne peut pas ne pas manger les fleurs.”)
That’s the reason why it always feels dangerous to write a message on this forum… I’m sure I’m doing a lot of mistakes in English, and I am surrounded by people who love when English is correctly written 
Except that we don’t use the same lists of exceptions in France… You can build your own logic on French exceptions! Here is an example of what you learn in France for -ir verbs: when you conjugate -ir verbs in first person, plural form (nous), if it ends by “-issons” (like “nous finissons”) it is in the second group of verbs and it conjugates like this. If not (venir → nous venons), it is in the dreaded third group. This is the group of verbs that all have exceptions (often different exceptions)…
It is often used with abstract concepts. When you type “on ne peut pas ne pas” in Google, you find “on ne peut pas ne pas manipuler” (you cannot not manipulate), “on ne peut pas ne pas communiquer” (you cannot not communicate), “on ne peut pas ne pas lutter” (you cannot not fight), “on ne peut pas ne pas être libre” (you cannot not be free)… It means “you don’t have the possibility to choose not to manipulate, communicate, fight, be free…”
Jean-Paul Sartre used this expression a lot…
Quite honestly, your English is, to my “ear”, rather natural. Until you go and say “do a mistake”–I always think of it as “make a mistake” 
But I understand.
Yeah, this was how to get people who speak English fluently to remember French conjugations–every language has its own way of describing its own grammar I remember when I was in France, I was discussing with our translator French verbs, and I was like “Oh, what type of verb is that one? I don’t recognize the conjugation.” (I believe it was from “Rire”, to laugh, because of a type of cheese?), and I was like “is it an -re verb or an -ir verb?” and she was like “Uh, what? The only kinds of verbs we have are…”. It was amusing, in retrospect. But it was also…15? years ago, so I don’t remember much.
Oh! It took me a moment, but that makes sense! Colloquially, we’d say “You must”, but in philosophy, you must be technical.
And in this case, now that I get it, I think English philosophers would also say “You cannot not X”. Though knowing philosophers, they’d spend thirty pages explaining what “not” means… 
Oops!
You’re right on that one.
To stay a bit on topic, the more I think about this new MacBook Air, the more my plan to buy an iPad next summer doesn’t seem to be a good idea anymore — I think a MacBook Air would be a much better choice for me.
Now if only Amazon could open a Kindle Store on Amazon.fr…
This philosopher cannot resist stepping in to say that W.V.O. Quine once observed (sorry, I can’t dig up the citation right now) that the double negative (found in many romance languages) is best understood as two parts or two occurrences of a single negation.
The fundamentals of logic—the fundamental laws of rational thought!—should not be condemned alongside the idiosyncracies of English syntax!
And if you want philosophers going on for 30 pp. about ‘not’ (well, about theories of negation), here you go:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
Cheers,
David
p.s. I, too, am about to purchase an 11" macbook air. Please don’t tell my wife until the return period has elapsed.