For, against, whatever…
« previous post | next post »
A tweet for the misnegation archive:
Thousands march in Berlin to protest against anti-racism https://t.co/iNobKJd1Zb
— South China Morning Post (@SCMPNews) October 13, 2018
This one has the unusual property of being purely lexical, with no explicit negations at all.
[h/t Donald Clarke]
Chips Mackinolty said,
October 14, 2018 @ 6:29 am
This is really about the gradual death of sub-editors/sub-editing, pre and post the print world–or their non existence in the online digital world.
It's a simple mistake, made on a deadline, one of those "whoops" mistakes that can be classed as misnegation. In the old days it would most likely have been picked up and corrected by a sub. Or picked up by one of those wonderful copytakers that saved my life on many occasion.
Alas, that class of print journalists in old news organisations is fast disappearing, and in the new online world has rarely/never existed.
Karl Weber said,
October 14, 2018 @ 7:04 am
"I hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, anti-racism"–George H. W Bush.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/17/opinion/when-the-president-talks.html
ktschwarz said,
October 14, 2018 @ 8:29 am
You don't count "anti-" as an explicit negation?
[(myl) What I meant is that there's no instance of "not", including contracted forms. In general morphological prefixes like anti-, non-, un- etc. work somewhat differently.]
@Chips Mackinolty, is there actual data on whether misnegations are in fact getting more common, or are more common in more rushed or less edited sources? Mark Liberman has collected plenty from decades-old books and writing that wasn't done on any deadline. My favorite is from The Hobbit.
Mistakes are interesting because they tell us something about what we notice easily and what we don't notice without training.
Brett said,
October 14, 2018 @ 7:03 pm
@ktschwarz: What is the one from The Hobbit? There is, of course, Bilbo's, "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve," from the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, but that statement appears to be merely confusing, not ill formed.
ktschwarz said,
October 14, 2018 @ 9:27 pm
@Brett, the link in the comment goes to the previous discussion here (thanks, Jerry Friedman), but I think I can add something. It's on the second-to-last page of The Hobbit, when Bilbo has returned from his quest just in time to find his home being auctioned off:
… which doesn't make sense as written, but makes sense if you read "happy" for "sorry". Or perhaps it was a scribal error skipping between two "sorry"s, something like:
Anyone got a copy of The Hobbit translated into another language? What was the translator's solution?
RfP said,
October 14, 2018 @ 10:02 pm
I believe Tolkien meant that there were people who said they were sorry to find the presumption wrong—but didn't actually mean it.
I think that the key to understanding this phrase is to hear the emphasis on said: "and not everybody who said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong."
Tolkien's prose is normally quite clear. But in this case, you really have to be listening for the cadence in just the right way in order to pick up his meaning.
RfP said,
October 14, 2018 @ 10:06 pm
And perhaps you need to be ready to think the very worst of the Sackville-Bagginses to hear the snark that holds the key to interpreting this sentence! :)
richardelguru said,
October 15, 2018 @ 6:06 am
Brett: 'Bilbo's, "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve," from the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, but that statement appears to be merely confusing, not ill formed.'
Surely intentionally so.
To me it looks like a not uncleverly formed sort of quasi-not-entirely-obvious put-down.
ktschwarz said,
October 15, 2018 @ 11:02 am
@RfP, this is an example of why it's hard to recognize misnegations: You have made sense of the sentence by coming up with a scenario based on expected human behavior, ignoring what it literally says. You're probably imagining people saying "I'm sorry for presuming you dead, and I'm glad to be wrong" — but "I'm sorry to be wrong" is quite different! You didn't imagine them saying "I'm sorry you're alive," but that's what the sentence says.
Misnegations reveal how much our understanding of language comes from context and prior knowledge rather than grammatical construction, to the point that it's hard to see what the grammatical construction actually is.
Michael Watts said,
October 15, 2018 @ 11:30 am
This isn't an example of ignoring what the sentence literally says. It quite literally says that there were people who said they were sorry to find the presumption wrong, but didn't mean it.
The problem is that this is total nonsense; no one is going to say "I'm sorry to learn that you're alive" whether they mean it or not.
RfP said,
October 15, 2018 @ 1:15 pm
@ ktschwarz, Michael Schwartz
Thanks for your patience—I stand corrected!
This was always one of my favorite passages in The Hobbit and I always misread it!
Sometimes it takes a while to cut through the fog.
ajay said,
October 17, 2018 @ 4:18 am
"To me it looks like a not uncleverly formed sort of quasi-not-entirely-obvious put-down."
Self-deprecation, surely. Bilbo is accusing himself of being misanthropic (mishobbitic).
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like" – I wish I knew many of you better.
"and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve," – and I think I ought to like most of you a lot more.
Stacey Harris said,
October 19, 2018 @ 4:55 pm
(Conversation has probably moved on, but …)
The Hobbit issue has to do with the ambiguity of "said so":
"In short, Bilbo was 'Presumed Dead', and not everybody that said so was sorry to find the presumption wrong."
The referent to "said so" can gramatically be either "Presumed dead" (as in reply to "Whatever's become of Bilbo?") or "Sorry to find the presumption wrong". The comma separating the two clauses tends to make us look for the referent in the "not everybody that said" clause, but that turns out to anomalous, since, indeed, one would not likely say "Sorry to hear you're not really dead". But there's no barrier to finding the referent in the first clause, and then everything is sensible.
ktschwarz said,
October 24, 2018 @ 1:54 am
The problem is not with "said so"; you can even drop it from the sentence. The problem is with identifying who "not everybody" refers to. "Not everybody X" implies "some people not-X". Who are these people? The context is a whole paragraph about threats to Bilbo's home, and the coordination with and implies that the second half of the sentence is also a threat. The natural interpretation is that they're Bilbo's enemies, or at least, those who value a bargain on silver spoons above Bilbo's life. But those are the ones who are sorry that Bilbo is alive, while his friends are happy!
With four negative-polarity terms in the sentence—dead, not, sorry, wrong—no wonder it's hard to parse. Logically they reduce to a positive (some were happy to find Bilbo alive), but the sentence was meant to say something negative (some wished he had stayed dead).