Absolved of having done nothing wrong

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Last month, the hockey star Patrick Kane was accused of rape, and investigations of the matter continue. Last week, he joined the Chicago Blackhawks' training camp, and at a press event organized by the team, he read a statement that addressed the accusations as follows:

While I have too much respect for the legal process
to comment on an on-going matter

I am confident
that once all the facts are brought to light
I will be absolved of having done nothing wrong

[Chris Hine and Stacy St. Clair, "Patrick Kane 'confident' he will be 'absolved' of wrongdoing", Chicago Tribune 9/17/2015.]

This must be in Upside-down Court, where defendants are accused (and either convicted or absolved) of being innocent. The COCA corpus has 14 instance of "be absolved of X", where X = responsibility (7), blame (4), liability,  crime, prosecution — and the responsibilities in question are not for praiseworthy or valuable things. What someone is absolved of is normally a sin or fault or crime, or the consequences of a sin or fault or crime.

David Haugh caught the misnegation, if not the upside-down presupposition ["Here's a question regarding Patrick Kane news conference: Why bother?", Chicago Tribune 9/17/2015]:

[W]hoever edited Kane's prepared statement didn't prepare long enough because being "absolved of having done nothing wrong," literally means he did something wrong.

John Kass agreed, but added a comment on the active vocabulary of hockey players ["'Presumed innocent' doesn't seem to apply to Patrick Kane", Chicago Tribune 9/18/2015]:

Yes, it's true. Kane foolishly spoke words that said he did something wrong. If he had replaced "nothing wrong" with "anything wrong," he might have coasted.  

It's also true that I've never heard hockey players use the word "absolved." Never.

This leaves us with a common problem that I've called "attributional abduction". Did the lawyers who prepared Kane's statement actually write the incoherent sentence that he uttered? Or did he misread the written statement, out of unfamiliarity with the verb absolve, or a preference for negative concord, or general situational stress?

At least in this case we have the recording, so the usual concerns about journalistic quotation practices [see "Journalistic quotation accuracy", 8/21/2013] can be set aside.

[h/t Carol Saller]

 

 

 

 



17 Comments

  1. Emilio Márquez said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 8:03 am

    The equivalent misnegation in Spanish would translate literally as “absolved of NOT having done nothing wrong”. The correct negation (in Spanish) would match its English translation perfectly (“absolved of having done anything wrong”) BUT could also be expressed colloquially as “absuelto de haber hecho nada malo”, which translates, literally, as “absolved of having done nothing wrong”!

  2. KevinM said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 8:48 am

    Could have been sheer reluctance to write the word "wrongdoing," even in the context of absolution. Could have been a case of journalistic caution backfiring (the same instinct that led to the newspaperese "pleaded innocent" for fear of dropping the "not" from "not guilty").

  3. cs said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 9:40 am

    It works if you can hear "of" as shorthand for something like "as a result of"

  4. Harvey said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 10:06 am

    OK, but can we cut him a little slack? We do know what he really meant, just as we'd understand him if he said "I ain't got no money."

  5. Steve said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 12:18 pm

    Another possibility (common with misnegations) is that he was (consciously or otherwise) torn between two constructions, and ended up with an unhappy blend of them. Something like "I am confident it will be found that I did nothing wrong" and "I am confident I will be absolved of having done anything wrong."

    FWIW, "absolved" is very much a part of my active vocabulary, yet I could easily see myself making a blunder like this if I was either speaking a bit carelessly or (somewhat paradoxically) trying too hard to be precise.

    [(myl) But in this case he was reading a prepared statement.]

  6. Gregory Kusnick said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 2:18 pm

    I was raised Roman Catholic but left the Church in my teens. When my younger brother came up for his First Communion, my mother insisted that the whole family take Communion with him. So I dutifully went into the confessional, told the priest I was there under duress and had nothing to confess, and was in turn absolved of having done nothing wrong.

  7. Xmun said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 3:30 pm

    Presumably the statement went through several drafts, one of them being substituted for another (absolved of any wrongdoing and shown to have done nothing wrong) and the final draft was a muddled mixture of the two. It often happens that revision is less thorough than good sense requires. And possibly the meaning of the verb "absolve" wasn't altogether clear to the person or people who prepared the statement.

  8. Bob Ladd said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 3:55 pm

    I'm with @Harvey. If Kane is a habitual user of multiple negation (I don't know if he is), this is more or less what you'd expect him to say for the meaning he obviously intended.

  9. DWalker said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 4:26 pm

    @Harvey: Double-negatives are (or should be) required with ain't:

    I ain't got no money.

    Ain't got no time for that.

    Ain't Got No (song from Hair).

  10. Gregory Kusnick said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 4:32 pm

    It seems to me the real issue here is not with over-negation, but with the interpretation of absolved as a synonym for exonerated. To me, absolved is more about forgiveness than innocence; to be absolved of any wrongdoing is not to say that he did nothing wrong, but that any wrong he did was not his fault and he will not be held accountable for it.

    On that view, then, to be absolved of having done nothing wrong implies that doing nothing wrong was a regrettable error, but it's OK, we'll let it pass. Still something of a muddle, of course, and clearly not what he meant, but also not the same as either "I ain't done nothing wrong" or "I did do something wrong".

  11. Guy said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 7:41 pm

    But "exonerated of having done nothing wrong" is still misnegated. I thinking changing "of" to "as" is the simplest fix for the original statement.

  12. Gregory Kusnick said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 8:58 pm

    Guy: Yes, reading absolved as exonerated is why people think it's misnegated. But I'm not convinced that exonerated is what he meant.

    He may have been trying to saying something like "I'm confident I'll be absolved of [i.e. held blameless for] any unintentional wrongdoing," but his lawyers vetoed that and insisted on a clear statement of "having done nothing wrong" (and thereby achieved the opposite of clarity).

  13. DPickering said,

    September 22, 2015 @ 9:25 pm

    I had a logic professor who used 'Ain't no woman like the one I got' as an example of multiple negation.

    [(myl) And notice that it's not "Ain't no woman like the one I don't got" — thereby hangs a dissertation.]

  14. Adrian said,

    September 23, 2015 @ 8:21 am

    My guess is that it says "anything" on the statement but he said "nothing" instead, since this substitution is normal (and has no effect on meaning) among the less intelligent.

  15. Guy said,

    September 23, 2015 @ 3:53 pm

    Gregory:

    But isn't it misnegated anyway? The complement of "of" is the thing that they no longer have liability for or are free from when someone has been absolved.

  16. JS said,

    September 24, 2015 @ 12:26 pm

    It's clear that "not having done anything wrong" should require neither absolution nor exoneration.

    Thus, "having done nothing wrong" of the statement must feature the adverb wrong modifying done; i.e., "having refrained, in an incorrect manner, from action". :/

  17. Jim said,

    September 25, 2015 @ 1:59 pm

    "It's clear that "not having done anything wrong" should require neither absolution nor exoneration."

    They were trying to throw him in prison for it anyway.

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