From Antonio Fortin: I’m re-reading Asimov's Foundation novels after nearly 35 years and I came across this example in Book 1, which just seems like a mess: “I don’t say, though,” added Barr, “that there aren’t cases where tech-men haven’t been bribed.” Obviously, the intended message is that there are cases where tech-men have been […]
From François-Michel Lang, "I had to read the article to be sure I understood what exactly had happened!" G.O.P. Lawmakers Override Kentucky Governor’s Veto on Anti-Trans Law The Kentucky measure bans access to gender-transition care for young people, and West Virginia’s governor signed a similar bill on Wednesday. Passage of bans also appears […]
From Breffni O'Rourke, another example of the conceptual tangle created by the interaction of scalar comparison and (implicit) negation: Just another one of these. There's no outright negation, but it seems related – the implied negative of "only" interacting with the scalar comparison "more slowly". The arithmetic comes out with the wrong sign in any […]
In reading texts from the earliest times of Chinese writing up to the present, and at all social levels and linguistic registers, I have noticed a curious phenomenon. Namely, often an overtly negative particle or term will have no privative or prohibitive force, but is simply there for rhythmic, clitic, or rhetorical function. Naturally, since […]
From this blog post: ICU beds are filled to capacity with unvaccinated COVID patients who are not vaccinated because they didn’t have access to immunization. They chose to be unvaccinated. A.L., who sent in the link, observes that "this seems like a particularly striking example, because the misnegated phrase ('not vaccinated because they didn’t have […]
"Can the Angels keep Shohei Ohtani? A payroll crisis looms in Los Angeles", 8/12/2021: Everything Shohei Ohtani has accomplished this summer is unprecedented: the high-end pitching and high-impact hitting, the takeover of the two days of All-Star events, the marketability. With a season résumé that looks like none other, he'll win the American League's Most […]
Here's another example for our long list of cases where smart people are either losing track of multiple negations, or applying a high-status form of negative concord in English. This one is from Jeremy Peters, "In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’", NYT 3/19/2021: “We also took a look at […]
From Annie Gottlieb: This kind of mistake is becoming a pandemic!This is a twofer!—misnegation AND the opposite of misnegation, whatever you call that—misaffirmation? On the rare occasions that his team actually trusts him in front of a camera, the presumptive democratic nominee never ceases to disappoint with his ability to — for lack of a […]
Dmitry Ostrovsky reacted to a litotic sentence in Bari Weiss's resignation letter: "None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper." Dmitry's email: This strikes me as very odd. It is not a simple "arithmetic" misnegation, if "none of this means that" and "don't" […]
A sign displayed at yesterday's congressional impeachment hearing: GOP adds new sign during the break pic.twitter.com/uI5U9mJTsf — Manu Raju (@mkraju) November 21, 2019
Garrett Wollman writes: Not sure if this really belongs in LL's misnegation files, but I found this sentence hard enough to parse (despite knowing exactly what the author meant) that I stumbled over it on a re-read: "The really troubling thing," Zora says to the rain, "is that I can't convince myself I'm not in […]
Eileen Sullivan, "Trump Publicly Urges China to Investigate the Bidens", NYT 10/3/2019: Mr. Trump has defended his conversation with Mr. Zelensky as “perfect” even after a reconstructed transcript of the call was released that showed him seeking help from Ukraine in investigating the Bidens. And he doubled down on his request on Thursday. “I would […]
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Readers have recently sent two links to examples where writers seem to have lost control of piled-up negatives.