Headlines that do "absolutely not" scan well
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At an event at Salem State University yesterday, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was interviewed on stage by sportscaster Jim Gray. Gray used the opportunity to ask Brady about the just-released Ted Wells report on Deflategate, and to ask him if the scandal "tainted" the Patriots' Super Bowl win. The headline that appeared on ESPN's news feed was: "Brady: Report does 'absolutely not' mar title."
The headline on MassLive was not so terse but used similar phrasing: "Tom Brady says Wells Report does 'absolutely not' take away from New England Patriots Super Bowl win."
In both cases, the headline writers were attempting to take a direct quote from Brady, "Absolutely not," and reframe this elliptical sentiment in a headline-worthy statement of opinion. First, let's check out what he actually said to Gray (the relevant exchange runs from 4:10 to 5:10 in the video here).
JG: Has this, however, detracted from your joy of winning the Super Bowl?
TB: Absolutely not. [Cheers]
JG: Why not?
TB: Because we earned and achieved everything that we got this year as a team. And I'm very proud of that. And our fans should be, too. [Cheers]
JG: Is the Super Bowl tainted? Should there be an asterisk? [Boos]
TB: What do you guys think? [Boos] Neither do I.
JG: Your answer was?
TB: Neither do I.
JG: No? It's not? Is that what you're saying?
TB: I said I asked what they thought.
JG: I asked you what you thought.
TB: I said no. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. [Cheers]
Stripping away the extraneous give-and-take, Gray's question of "Is the Super Bowl tainted?" gets a response of "Absolutely not," which we interpret as "The Super Bowl is absolutely not tainted." But when the response is made to be part of a statement with auxiliary do, as in the above headlines, it sounds odd to keep "absolutely not" as a unitary phrase, interposing absolutely between does and not. It would be more idiomatic for the headlines to say "Report 'absolutely [does] not' mar title" or "Report 'absolutely [does] not' take away from Super Bowl win," but that would break up the direct quote.
There are other ways to fashion a headline out of Brady's "Absolutely not" response. It's fine in the form "is 'absolutely not' tainted" (or losing the is through copula deletion):
- "Tom Brady: Super Bowl is 'absolutely not' tainted by DeflateGate" (Mashable)
- "Brady: Super Bowl XLIX victory 'absolutely not' tainted" (NFL.com)
And it's fine in a question-and-answer format that maintains the spirit of the exchange:
- "Brady on whether Deflategate taints Super Bowl win: 'Absolutely not'" (Fox Sports)
- "Tainted Super Bowl? Brady says 'Absolutely not'" (Indy Star)
But "does absolutely not" does absolutely not make for easy reading.
(Hat tip, Bert Vaux.)
John from Cincinnati said,
May 8, 2015 @ 3:52 pm
Ooh, ooh, how abso freaking lutely prescriptivist of you. I'm a 70 year old native English speaker born and raised in New York City to similarly native English speaking New Yorker parents and I do absolutely not in the slightest detect a disfluency when someone 'does absolutely not verb' something.
I'll grant you that Google ngram doesn't find 'do absolutely not', but it does absolutely not fail to find 'do certainly not', discounting sentence-interrupted hits '… what should we do? Certainly not …'. Occurrences of the construction are in discursive texts, not in headlines, as 'The parallels, to which Gordis refers, do certainly not disprove its possibility.' and 'And they do certainly not value humility.' and 'most people working on this task do certainly not realize that their efforts might help'.
Ben Zimmer said,
May 8, 2015 @ 3:53 pm
Not being prescriptivist — just saying it sounds odd and unidiomatic to my ear. YMMV.
Jen said,
May 8, 2015 @ 5:03 pm
It sounds very Charlie-and-Lola to me (more Lola, obviously, but you know what I mean…)
Jerry Friedman said,
May 8, 2015 @ 5:05 pm
John from Cincinnati: Your examples of "do certainly not" are all from non-native speakers of English: Antoon Schoors, Annick Prieur, and Peter Bernholz.
"Do certainly not" and "do absolutely not" definitely don't sound like idiomatic English to me.
===Dan said,
May 8, 2015 @ 5:22 pm
It's an attempt to put a direct quote into a sentence Brady never uttered, and the result is awkward to my ear. Maybe one of the motivations for the headline is to avoid the passive voice (not that it's a good reason).
This kind of playing with quotes reminds me in a way of a billboard many years ago for "The Club," the anti-car-theft device.
Cops say "use it" or lose it.
Benjamin said,
May 9, 2015 @ 7:04 am
I don't see a problem necessarily with the language used in the heading – I think the author is just addressing the first question and not the second. But the author seems to assume that Brady feels the Wells Report (getting caught) doesn't detracted from the joy of winning the Super Bowl, when it could also mean that Brady feels that doing the deed doesn't detract from the joy of winning the Super Bowl (assuming the Wells Report is true).
Neal Goldfarb said,
May 9, 2015 @ 12:40 pm
My reaction is the same as Ben's—"does absolutely not" sounds very odd to me—but a little googling shows that it is in fact used by some people who appear to be native speakers of English.
It's interesting that this is a case in which following the prescriptivist prohibition against "splitting verbs" results in a greater idiomaticity than violating it would. That's the opposite of what usually results from following the "rule."
J.W. Brewer said,
May 9, 2015 @ 1:28 pm
It seems at least possible that the don't-split-verbs taboo is in part an unjustified overgeneralization from an observation that there are sometimes two-word sequences that don't usually get split. There is no reason why it can't be unidiomatic-to-ungrammatical to stick an adverb between "do" [meaning any inflected form of the lemma] and "not" but perfectly fine to stick an adverb between [some form of] "have" and [some form of] "be." The fact that the sequence "does not" collapses readily to "doesn't," which is unsplittable except perhaps via expletive infixation, may be relevant here, although I guess maybe a piece of contrary evidence is that "have not been" collapses to "haven't been" but "have ADV not been" is fine.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
May 11, 2015 @ 12:47 am
@J.W. Brewer: I think the key factor is that in "does not mar", the "not" is what licenses the "does" ("does mar" is grammatical, but marked, and means something more than just "mars"), whereas in "have not been", the "have" does not require anything special to license it ("have been" is normal). So "does absolutely not mar" is awkward because the "does" feels unlicensed when it's not immediately followed by the "not", whereas "have absolutely not been" doesn't have that problem.
Chris Waters said,
May 12, 2015 @ 3:26 am
My reaction may puzzle everyone, but the first headline feels ok to me, while the second seems awkward and stilted. I'm not entirely sure what the difference is that makes one seem more acceptable to me, but I think it may have something to do with words that follow. For example:
?That does absolutely not matter.
*That does absolutely not ring true.
I can imagine myself saying the former (though it would feel a bit odd), but the latter simply seems wrong to me.
50-yo Californian speaker.
Ian Horwill said,
May 14, 2015 @ 7:28 am
I find it to be a perfectly reasonable and succinct example of headlinese and have no queasy feelings when reading it. I am much more uncomfortable with words in square brackets; these always seem clunky and intrusive to me. (50-ish native UK English speaker.)