The classic example was that when the Rolling Stones sang, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” they were “actually” saying they got plenty. Nobody really believed that. It was clear from the context what the Stones were saying. But the larger lesson was not lost.

So many of us dutifully refrain from using double negatives like “I don’t never go there,” “I don’t like no politicians,” “I can’t hardly wait.” Their unacceptability is such that The New York Times stylebook doesn’t even have an entry on them — the assumption is that nobody would think to use such a nonstandard construction.

This animus against double negatives, however, did not always exist. As my Pocket Fowler’s Modern English Usage notes, “They were once a feature of standard English, and are to be found in Chaucer, Shakespeare and other writers up to the 17th century.” The idea was that negatives in a sentence were self-reinforcing, not self-cancelling.

But gradually that logic changed — “An arithmetical argument replaced a linguistic one,” Fowler’s says — and by the 18th century, grammar books denounced double negatives, and playwrights depicted lower-class characters as using them.

What the president now says he should have said doesn’t really fall in the category of the usual frowned-upon double negative. What he claims he meant to say, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be” Russia behind the election hacking, isn’t ungrammatical. What he did say, “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia, was grammatical, too. It was also front-page news.