ShmoopTube

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Here's your shmoop du jour... What should replace the underlined portion

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of the below sentence, if anything? When Mary's parents accused her of denting

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the car, she told them she hadn't done nothing.

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Here are the potential answers:

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So... what is this question asking?

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Or ... maybe we should ask... what's it not not asking?

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Yeah... a couple of our answers are vacationing in Double Negativeville.

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A nice place to visit, but we wouldn't not want to live there...

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In A, we've got "hadn't not done." One too many negatives. Scratch it.

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The verb tense is screwy in B, so that one's off our list.

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It really should be, "She HAD done nothing."

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But, as is, Mary's coming across a little bit like Huck Finn.

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The "hadn't done nothing" in the original sentence is a double negative, too, so we

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can't very well leave the sentence as is, either.

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C is the only one that works. Note how they cleverly replaced nothing -- a negative -- with

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ANYTHING... which is only slightly more positive.

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Answer is C.

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As in, "Can't not love not living there."

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