As a kid growing up, I didn’t understand why everyone said “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee” was incorrect English. I just knew they made great baked products.
The famous Sara Lee campaign was built around that odd but unforgettable line:
“Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
It was catchy, a little strange, and maybe not what your English teacher wanted to hear, but that was the point. The double negative made people notice it, remember it, and repeat it.
The commercials usually showed off Sara Lee cakes, pies, pound cake, coffee cake, and other desserts that looked like they came from a bakery, even if they came from the freezer. For a lot of families, Sara Lee was the “company’s coming” dessert you could serve without doing all the baking yourself.
Looking back, the grammar may have been questionable, but the advertising worked. Everybody had foods they didn’t like, but the campaign wanted us to believe Sara Lee was the one thing nobody could turn down.
And honestly, as a kid, I wasn’t diagramming the sentence. I was looking at the cake.