Archive for Negation
Three negations in one headline
From François-Michel Lang, "I had to read the article to be sure I understood what exactly had happened!"
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 imminent in Idaho and Missouri.
By Campbell Robertson and Ernesto Londoño, NYT (March 29, 2023)
Override
Veto
Anti
Here follow the first five out of seventeen paragraphs in the article:
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kempt and sheveled
From François Lang:
I did not know you'd invented "topolect" and "character amnesia"!
Now…since you have a predilection for naming heretofore unnamed things, I am wondering if you could work your linguistic magic to describe words like "unkempt" and "disheveled", which appear far more often than their equivalent without the negative prefix.
I hope that pushes some linguistic buttons (assuming, of course, that no such word actually exists!).
The best I've come up with is "arhizomorphic", but I'm sure you and your Language Log groupies can do better!
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can you not
Hidden behind the Keurig in our departmental office, I've been noticing a gawky, ungainly, stray coffee mug with these three words on the side:
can
you
not
No capitalization and no punctuation.
I was mystified. Whatever could that mean? I can imagine an arch, haughty, snotty person saying that to someone implying that they don't want the person to whom they're talking to do whatever it is they're doing. In essence, I suppose it means "You're bothering / bugging / annoying me"; "stop doing that"; "get lost".
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How to say "We don't have any pickled pigs' feet"
I have a terrible hankering for pickled pigs' feet and have been to about a dozen stores in the Philadelphia area looking for a bottle of them. So far no luck.
But I'm learning a lot about how store personnel tell me they don't have any.
Mostly, of course, they just say, "No(, we don't have any)".
If they're not sure, they usually say (regretfully), "I don't think we have any."
Today, however, I received the same answer four times in one store, "(It's possible) we may / might not have any" — as they walked me around to different parts of the store looking for the pickled pigs' feet.
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