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From: a8mar@ttacs.ttu.edu (Mark O. Webb)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: a source for "two postitives don't make a negative" story
Date: 28 Feb 1996 19:13:06 GMT

In case anyone is still tracking that story, here's the earliest citation I can find. Note the lack of specificity on time, place, and people involved. In other words, we still don't know if this really happened.

NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Aug 14, 1977, p.46

...At a rarefied seminar in England, a philosopher of language once presented a formal lecture in which he announced that a double negative is known to mean a negative in some languages and a positive in others but that no natural language had yet been discovered in which a double positive means a negative. Whereupon professor Sydney Morgenbesser is said to have piped up from the back of the room with an instant, sarcastic, "Yeah, yeah." This convulsed the audience in laughter and put a blot on the speaker's career. (He would suffer afterward from the philosophical equivalent of the Ralph Branca syndrome.)

[end quote]

So whaddya say? Does anybody have an earlier or more authoritative source? Who was the poor philosopher who was the butt of SM's sarcasm? Where was this "rarefied seminar", and when? The obvious next step is to ask Sydney Morgenbesser himself if he can vouch for the voracity of the NYTM story. I'll try that next, and post his response.