Why is the phrase "Two can play at that game!" always referring to something negative?

That’s not what he meant last night. (waggle, waggle)

Start a new trend!

Giggle giggle!
That might be an interesting game. Go for it PattyMelt!

When I was a kid, a common saying was “Two against one is nigger fun.” We just said it, it had no connotation or meaning to us, other than two against one is not fair. If one person doesn’t play fair, neither does the other one.

It is because it is used in response to someone doing something negative or duplicitous. It means “I can be just as nasty back at you!” i.e., you start telling lies around town about me, I can tell some whoppers about you. You start hitting on my girl, I’ll be sleeping with yours so fast your eyes will blink!

It has nothing to do with @kritiper‘s racist saying from his childhood.

We had phrases like that when I was a kid @kritiper. Never thought twice about it. Kind of blows my mind thinking about it today.
And I think it means exactly what @kritiper said. I know what it means. I just wonder why we don’t use it to mean the opposite.

@zenvelo When we were kids where we lived, there wasn’t anything racist about it. It was just something we said. Sure it’s racist, but we didn’t even know the word and wouldn’t/couldn’t have known what it meant unless somebody told us and maybe we wouldn’t have cared. I never talked to a black person until I was 11 years old. I didn’t even really know what a negro was. Sure, we saw them on the news in black and white. But when I met one from Nigeria, Africa, I didn’t understand that they were the same thing. It was only enough to know that two against one, of any color or colors, isn’t fair.

But “two can play that game” means if one person can play dirty, so can the other person. It isn’t about revenge, it’s about playing the game by equal rules, or lack thereof, equally. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Never really thought about using that phrase in a positive sense. I usually use it in a paybacks are a bitch sense, or a Karma will come back and bite you in the ass every time sense. Just sayin’, I’m not a hateful or negative person.

@kritiper I remember when, for some unknown reason, Einey Miney Mo turned into “Catch a tiger by his toe…” It was in the mid 60’s. I had no clue why it changed. “Tiger” meant nothing more to me than “nigger,” but whatever.
Now I know.