No less indisputably not going to not work
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Two Guys and Guy for 5/29/2013 offers a rare case of litotes with the classical motivation of modesty:
But most examples have some other motivation. And whatever the motivation, the litotic impulse often reaches the border of misnegation, as in this stack of three negative morphemes from Jorge Luis Borges, "A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell", as translated by Katherine Silver:
Macaulay says that the preeminence of Homer as an epic poet, of Shakespeare as a dramatic poet, of Demosthenes as an orator, and of Cervantes as a novelist is no less indisputable than the preeminence of Boswell as a biographer.
Despite the dictum that "Triplex negatio confundit", this one comes out right in the end. Inexperienced users might need to work out the polarity with pencil and paper, but "no less indisputable" is (or at least was) a common fixed phrase in certain kinds of writing.
[Update — or maybe Borges' sentence doesn't come out right after all, as suggested by haamu in the comments. Given that the stature of Homer, Shakespeare, Demosthenes, and Cervantes is established from the start as the point of reference for preeminence, we should say that their preeminence is "no more indisputable than that of Boswell as a biographer". Or we could turn the whole thing around and say that "the preeminence of Boswell as a biographer is no less indisputable than …".
What Macauley actually wrote took the first of these options:
Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers.
The inversion is due to Borges and not to his translator, since the original reads:
Dice Macaulay que la primacía de Homero como poeta épico, de Shakespeare como poeta dramático,de Demóstenes como orador, de Cervantes como novelista, no es menos indiscutible que la primacía de Boswell como biógrafo.
So the quotation from Borges is a case of misnegation, or at least scalar inversion, after all!]
Of course, there are plenty of common fixed phrases whose polarity almost always comes out wrong, from "impossible/hard/difficult to underestimate", to the pattern underlying "No head injury is too trivial to ignore".
Doreen said,
August 7, 2013 @ 9:05 am
A quick google seems to indicate that Rickard Jonasson (the cartoonist) is a Swede, so his non-nativeness might have something to do with the unusual usage.
D.O. said,
August 7, 2013 @ 9:26 am
It sounds awfully like false modesty. Maybe it is also within classical motivation…
haamu said,
August 7, 2013 @ 9:28 am
Who am I to second-guess Borges? But I'll do it anyway.
"No less indisputable than" doesn't seem entirely symmetric to me. It feels like the formulation needs to be reversed to make the point properly:
[(myl) A very good point. In fact, it should be "… no more indisputable …", right? Misnegation (or at least scalar inversion) after all!]
Faldone said,
August 7, 2013 @ 9:33 am
I wonder what the original looked like in the Borges example, negative concord being grammatical in Spanish.
[(myl) Read it here:
Dice Macaulay que la primacía de Homero como poeta épico, de Shakespeare como poeta dramático,de Demóstenes como orador, de Cervantes como novelista, no es menos indiscutible que la primacía de Boswell como biógrafo.
Pretty much the same, including the inversion noted by haamu.]
J.W. Brewer said,
August 7, 2013 @ 10:40 am
Maybe we've gone past the modesty-motivated form of litotes by employing other strategies. Saying something was "no small accomplishment" does not ring to my modern ear as significantly more modest than caling it a "significant accomplishment," but perhaps that's in part because we have a convention whereby someone who has achieved a significant accomplishment is allowed to signal modesty by saying (not credibly if taken literally) "oh, it was no big deal." There are contexts where the litotic approach is not only not modest (not even, I think, feigning modesty as a rhetorical strategy) but comes out stronger. E.g., in stock legal rhetoric you would I think more typically say "it was simply not improper for the defendant to have done X," whereas the more straightforward alternative "it was proper for the defendant to have done X" sounds blander. (I would tend to use the latter only if there was a litotic set-up like "plaintiff does not deny that it was proper for the defendant etc." Not sure how to distinguish that from the "not unblack dog" Orwell peeved about.
quodlibet said,
August 7, 2013 @ 11:08 am
@haamu – actually Macaulay's formulation was "Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets … than Boswell is the first of biographers." He mentions Shakespeare and Demosthenes but not Cervantes. I suspect Borges was well aware of this and having a little fun.
Mark said,
August 7, 2013 @ 12:53 pm
In the page you link to to explain "litotes", http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/L/litotes.htm, they offer this as one of two examples of litotes:
It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain. —J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
I doubt whether "not very" as used here really should be classed as figurative. In such uses it does not seem to mean (by pointed understatement) "very not" (and so it differs from the other example, "no small accomplishment" used to mean "very big accomplishment)". Also, it seems equivalent to "not so" and "not that", where it seems strained to think of "so" and "that" meaning "extremely" (we don't say "it's that serious" to mean "it's very serious" except in special conversational contexts). "Not [very/so/that]" in this use seems to be a degree modifier that typically roughly means "less than fairly".
haamu said,
August 7, 2013 @ 1:52 pm
@quodlibet, @myl: Thanks for the original Macaulay. Given how Cervantes figures in the latter parts of this lecture, it is neither surprising nor unskillful that he somehow found his way into Borges' recollection of the quote.
haamu said,
August 7, 2013 @ 2:19 pm
@quodlibet, @myl:
(I meant to continue…)
Even better, though, is to realize that going from Macaulay's original "not more decidedly" to Borges' "no less indisputable" adds 3 backflips to the original negative.
Then the pleasure is compounded by reading that Boswell's preeminence, asserted through quadruple inversion, came despite or because of (another backflip, or maybe not) a raft of negative qualities. And even further, that Boswell himself viewed those negatives as positive contributors to his objective, as things to be showcased.
So the layering of that one phrase adroitly mirrors the layering of the lecture itself.
Rubrick said,
August 7, 2013 @ 3:57 pm
@haamu: I have never found anyone harder to avoid second-guessing than Borges.