I was at the grocery store and a woman in fornt of me had a stange conversation with her child. After asking if she could go wait in the car the mother told her “You can’t do nothing.” But doesnt that just mean she must be doing something if taken literally? Or possible she could be meaning that you CAN do everything? Encouragement or confusion… poor english amuses me.
Haha she was black
If language were as rational as mathematics, then you would be right. A double negative = a positive.
In formal grammar, “You can’t do nothing” is bad, unless you specifically mean, “It is not possible for you to do nothing at all, therefore you must do something.”
The opposite of nothing would be something, not everything, so it wasn’t the inspiring call to arms that you hoped.
In vernacular English, there is a long-established convention of using the multiple negative for emphasis. Chaucer knew a thing or two about English, and he used the multiple negative.
<<Haha she was black>> What a strange an irrelevant thing to say.
My wife (who used to study linguistics) once told me that in some languages, including certain west african ones, you have to negate all the words in the sentence. The multiple negatives could theoreticly have survived the transition to English. I have no idea how that is though.
True dat…in French, you can’t do anything is vous ne pouvez rien faire where ne and rien both negate the verb pouvez. And lots of black people speak some dialect of French…I can’t remember what its called though.
4 hours ago i sat a 3 hour english language AS level exam and it’s all coming back to haunt me in this thread 
If I were going to tell someone they couldn’t do anything, I would use the more informal “tu” pronoun, because I have obviously gone past the point of being polite. (Tu ne peux rien faire.) That’s like saying Excusez-moi madame, mais vous êtes aussi grosse que la plus grosse vâche que j’ai jamais vue dans toute ma vie. (Excuse me ma’am, but you are as fat as the fattest cow I have ever seen in my whole life.)
I just thought that was some interesting juxtaposition.
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that q-:
Reminds me of an episode of Leave It To Beaver, where Eddie tells Beaver to tell his Spanish friend, usted tiene una cara como puerco, which in English means you have the face of a pig, and some people I know who speak Spanish say that usted is the formal way of saying you, so he thought that was funny too.
from the simpson’s: it’s idiomadic, bee-otch.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Double negatives used as a positive go back to way before Chaucer’s time, back to the Anglo-Saxon days, when the language was much more Germanic in nature. Makes for fun reading. Gotta love a culture where they have such a bleak outlook on life that they don’t even bother having a future tense, yet something like 80 words for or related to “sword” 
Mexican.
It’s pretty clear that this mother is simply concerned that her child have as complex a linguistic environment as possible. In the car, there would be little information to process verbally. In the store, there is quite a bit, including product packaging, signage, and peoples’ conversations. Relatively speaking, the child’s mental load, at this special time in her cognitive development, would be “nothing” were she to go to the car.
It’s easy to postulate a conversation earlier, something along the lines of:
“Mother, I weary of this constant linguistic stimulation” (turns down volume on NPR documentary radio program)
"Yes, I know, Loved One, but at this point in your cognitive training program, you are scheduled for an average daily linguistic load of 4.65, and as of this moment (consults watch and gazes into the sky for a moment) you are at only 4.31. Therefore we will have to push it this morning, you’re going to have to go into the grocery store with me."
At this point, the conversation overheard in the store should gain its proper perspective.
People who ever did nothing are interresting.
The ones who did on purpose (and controlled) are -to me- kind of scary.
Oh right Southwest.