Language Log

I am quite certain that the reviewer kiwi78 was trying to do good things for the Nahm restaurant in Knightsbridge, a district of south-west London. But the comment left at the Bookatable.com site's page about Nahm actually said that the restaurant "never fails to disappoint."

Think about it for a moment. For the restaurant, that's not good, is it? Disappointing. It couldn't fail to disappoint.

But look at the full context of kiwi78's remarks:

Nahm never fails to disappoint on flavour & service. Dishes are complex yet superbly balanced & always beautifully presented. If you're new or not confident with Thai food the staff are very attentive & knowledgeable.

It's supposed to be a great review. And the restaurant took it for that: the management has started including kiwi78's comment in its advertising material!

Wikipedia's article on the Cornish language (the Brythonic Celtic language once spoken in the county of Cornwall, England) quotes this sentence (twice, in fact) from Henry Jenner, author of Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904):

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

Oh, what a mess we do create when first we practice to negate! Let's just think that sentence through, counting up the negations carefully.

Miguel Helft, "Twins’ Facebook Fight Rages On", NYT 12/30/2010 (emphasis added):

As they talked about the Facebook case, no detail was too small to omit, from where they first met Mr. Zuckerberg (the Kirkland House dining room) to the layout of Mr. Zuckerberg’s dorm room, to the content of the e-mails he had sent them after they asked him to do computer programming for a Web site called Harvard Connection.

Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics, which I will keep updated as the years roll by:

This post from Amy Hamblin's Community Blog was on the front page of the Obama-Biden web site for a while last night:

We're still awaiting the final results tonight, but one thing is clear — this grassroots movement can never be underestimated. Thank you to everyone who helped us make an astounding 1,053,791 calls today! I know it wasn't easy and many of you kept calling long after you were tired and your voice had grown hoarse, but your calls to get our supporters out the polls helped tip the scales in key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. [emphasis added]

We've discussed the general phenomenon of overnegation — semantic problems typically arising from the combination of modals, negatives, and scalar predicates —  many times in the past. The particular case of cannot/must not underestimate/overestimate is discussed here, here, and here.