Learn English – Meaning of sentence with double negation

double-negationmeaning-in-context

I'm a learner of English, and I got this sentence from a dating book which I find difficult to understand:

We know a man who was horribly disfigured by fire who has a constant
stream of women in his life, who would never dream of thinking of
himself as sexually inadequate.

The word never is a negative word and inadequate also has a negative meaning. There are two ways I can understand this sentence:

(1) Negative plus negative gives positive (my Chinese grammar), so the sentence means the same as

He would dream of thinking of himself as sexually adequate.

(2) Double negative strengthens the negation, so the sentence means the same as

He would dream of thinking of himself as sexually inadequate

or

He would never dream of thinking of himself as sexually adequate.

Best Answer

Your option #1 is much closer to the intended meaning, but you haven't quite construed it correctly. The two negatives do indeed cancel each other out. But when you cancel out the word never the result is always, so the plain un-negated sentence would be something like

He always dreams of thinking of himself as sexually adequate.

However, this still misrepresents the meaning. This is because the idiom to never dream of carries a negative connotation, and when you un-negate the sentence you should take out that idiom entirely. So the plain meaning of the sentence is more like the following:

He always thinks of himself as sexually adequate.

Or, to put it more strongly:

He is confident in his sexual adequacy.

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