Having it both ways
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An AP story about technical fouls in the NBA includes two semantically interesting quotes from LeBron James (Tim Reynolds, "Technicals Remaining an Issue During NBA Preseason", 10/19/2010):
"I've seen a couple of my teammates get technicals for, I'm not going to say nothing," James said, "but really nothing."
"That's $2,000 for a technical these days, man. It's not really about the money, but it is."
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October 19, 2010 @ 7:18 am
[…] Language Log » Having it both ways languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2720 – view page – cached An AP story about technical fouls in the NBA includes two semantically interesting quotes from LeBron James (Tim Reynolds, "Technicals Remaining an Issue During NBA Preseason", 10/19/2010): Tweets about this link […]
Chris said,
October 19, 2010 @ 7:20 am
I'm not going to say these are hedges, but really they are, right?
Mark P said,
October 19, 2010 @ 7:51 am
I guess the second quote really means something like, "That money is like pocket change for me but I still think it's too much for a technical foul."
tpr said,
October 19, 2010 @ 7:57 am
Sentences that begin with "I don't mean to be rude, but…" are often like that too, I've noticed.
Pflaumbaum said,
October 19, 2010 @ 8:12 am
This is praeteritio, isn't it? Cicero used to do it a lot. "Far be it from me to say you're an idiot, but… you're an idiot."
[(myl) The first one is praeteritio ("passing over" = "I will pass over in silence my opponent's many failures and crimes…"), but the second one is a sort of non-contradiction contradiction version of the well-known non-tautology tautologies.]
Mr Fnortner said,
October 19, 2010 @ 8:52 am
In his first sentence James compares an objective value with his subjective value. He might have been more eloquent, but he was clear. This is not much different from saying, "It wasn't a foul foul. It was the ref's opinion."
[(myl) In my opinion, both of the quoted statements are both eloquent and clear.
With all due respect, I continue to find it interesting that pointing to an interesting use of language is so often interpreted as implicitly criticizing it.]
John said,
October 19, 2010 @ 9:54 am
WIth all due respect…
Dr. I. Needtob Athe said,
October 19, 2010 @ 10:06 am
Victim of love, I see a broken heart
I could be wrong, but I'm not.
(Victim of Love, by The Eagles)
NemaVeze said,
October 19, 2010 @ 10:12 am
Reminds me of They Might Be Giants lyrics.
and
Brett said,
October 19, 2010 @ 10:29 am
I'm not sure what the first one means, actually. I see two plausible readings. In the, "I'm not going to say nothing," the "nothing" in question might be what he is claiming to say ("I'm not going to say nothing [about what the technical fouls were for]"), even though he immediately violates the claim. Or he might mean, "I'm not going to say [the fouls were called for doing] nothing, but [it was] really nothing [worth blowing the whistle for]." Without hearing him say it, I can't distinguish which one is meant, although I lean toward the latter.
asllearner said,
October 19, 2010 @ 10:45 am
Not for nothing, but could you explain the meaning of "not for nothing"?
Dan T. said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:30 am
Is "praeteritio" connected with the preterite tense?
[(myl) Yes — here's the OED's etymology discussion:
Note that there's another meaning of preterite as well, "A person not elected to salvation by God" (in theologies where the elect and the preterite are divinely pre-ordained).]
Mark Etherton said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:33 am
There's also the old Soviet joke about a prisoner asking a new arrival in the Gulag about his sentence. The new arrival says "I got ten years but I didn't do anything. Ten years, and for nothing!", to which the reply is "It can't be for nothing. Nothing is seven years".
John Cowan said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:36 am
Cicero's famous praeteritio: "Nam illa nimis antiqua praetereo, quod C. Servilius Ahala Sp. Maelium novis rebus studentem manu sua occidit"; freely, "I omit, as too antiquated to mention, the case of Gaius Servilius, who killed Spurius Maelius with his own hands for fomenting revolution", from his first oration against Catiline. Note the presence of the verb praetereo.
John said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Curiously, the version of the article linked to now omits the second sentence. I dug another version up with the quote still in it: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/39735895/ns/sports-nba/
@ Brett – the context provided by the article makes it fairly clear that transgressions which used to go unnoticed/unpenalized are now being taken seriously. So I think your second version is probably what James was expressing.
I like "It's not really about the money, but it is." I could sit here thinking about that phrase for hours.
Bloix said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:44 am
There appears to be something going here with the word "really." In the first quote, "really nothing" appears to mean "not literally nothing, but something so close to nothing that to treat as more than nothing is unreasonable." So "really" is being used to mean the opposite of its literal meaning – in roughly the same way that some people use "lliterally" to mean "figuratively."
In the second quote – well, I don't understand the second quote. "It's not really about the money" makes sense to me if "really" is being used in its literal meaning – $2000 is a trivial amount for these guys, and they don't feel the fine in their pocketbooks, so it makes sense to say that the insult is more important than the fine. But if that's what he means, then what in the world does the second part mean – "but it is"? Is he saying that it really is about the $2000? That doesn't make any sense as a matter of fact and it doesn't make any sense as logically connected to the first half of the sentence. Maybe what he means is that it's about the symbolic value of $2000, not the purchasing power represented by $2000? Or maybe he's just flat-out contradicting himself – "We don't care about $2000, but we do care about $2000." I can guess at what he's trying to say from the context, but the words he's using don't communicate very much information.
Pflaumbaum said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:45 am
@ Dan T – they are etymologically connected, both from the verb praetereo, to pass by, pass over – as in 'the elect and the preterite'.
@ Mark – great joke, I came across it the other day in a book of communist jokes. Another one that I'm probably going too far off topic in posting, but maybe has some vague conceptual link to praeteritio:
What's colder than the cold water in a Bucharest apartment?
The hot water.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 19, 2010 @ 11:58 am
James? Is he a basketball player or something?
I interpret the second as, "I'd be ashamed to say that this trivial amount of money is important to me, and I'd like to point out the scoring opportunity for the other team and the falseness of the accusation are more important, but I must admit to my shame that the money is important to me."
But I may be prejudiced. As someone who grew up in Cleveland, I must admit that last year LBJ was my favorite basketball player, but this year I've never heard of him.
@MYL: I think people often call attention to an "interesting" locution as a way of criticizing it.
Chris said,
October 19, 2010 @ 12:43 pm
As if on cue, Andrew Sullivan posted an eerily related quote from Rush Limbaugh today (regarding photos of Barack Obama):
"These pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly," Limbaugh said as he opened his program.
"There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look" (emphasis added).
rpsms said,
October 19, 2010 @ 12:59 pm
regarding the linked article, which clarifies the 2000$ by adding it all up:
This is like AOL back in the modems days when they charged per minute and fractions thereof. When you disconnected, it threw up a confirmation page wihich loaded ads, which cost the user .01 cents. Not a lot of money, but when you consider they did this to millions of users….
The Ridger said,
October 19, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
What rpsms said: It's not about the money – that is, not about his losing $2000 which is chickenfeed – but it is – that is, about the league making money off the players.
Army1987 said,
October 19, 2010 @ 2:11 pm
It reminds me of Totò's Qui lo dico e qui lo nego 'I hereby say it and I hereby deny it.' (That is, more or less, "I'm telling you this, but don't tell anyone else I told you.")
Joyce Melton said,
October 19, 2010 @ 4:22 pm
This is the eloquence of the street and the athletic field and the comedy stage. It's almost poetry where ironic contradiction can add nuances and layers to meaning. That's using ironic in the loose modern sense, not in the classical sense, except that the classical sense, if you take it that way, adds something, too.
groki said,
October 19, 2010 @ 7:59 pm
@Bloix: "really nothing" […] So "really" is being used to mean the opposite of its literal meaning
well, I hear the "really" there not as "truly" but more as "realistically" or "in the real world": as "real-ity-al-ly" one might say. (ok, you probably wouldn't! :)
groki said,
October 19, 2010 @ 8:18 pm
@Dan T., @Pflaumbaum:
the tense is the past: and those passed are tense, too.
Peter Gerdes said,
October 20, 2010 @ 2:17 am
Both these statements parse quite clearly for me.
1) It's not that people are getting technical fouls for playing good clean basketball so don't think I'm saying what they did was all ok but their misconduct was far too minor to justify a technical.
To see this in another context consider the following remark made about a friend Jim who just got sentenced to a 10 year jail term for selling weed.
"I'm not going to say that Jim got convicted over nothing" (don't think I'm suggesting it's ok/not a big deal to sell weed) "but Jim got sent ten years in jail for really nothing" (But it's not like he did anything like rape or kill that could justify that kind of sentence)
2) It's not that I'm only complaining about losing money, I'd still be upset about the principal of the matter even if I didn't pay 2,000 bucks for each technical, but that kind of fine makes these calls really unreasonable.
Alternatively you could read this as denying he was asking people to feel sorry for the fines he pays but..
—
I hypothesize these kind of self-negating remarks are simply ways of saying, "Hey, yah you could interpret what I'm about to say in a bad way but I don't mean it *that* way"
A.D. Pask-Hughes said,
October 20, 2010 @ 4:18 am
In the UK, at least, with regards to football, to suggest that referees are giving harsh penalties for 'nothing', or to suggest that money is an issue, would be regarded as culturally, and probably professionally, problematic.
Footballers don't come across well if they complain about fines and so forth, due to the public's knowledge of their high wages.
In other words, I just interpreted these sentences as hedges, and the plain meaning that was intended as:
"I've seen a couple of my teammates get technicals for nothing"
and
"That's $2,000 for a technical these days, man [which is a problem]"
You may not want to make those claims quite as directly as that though.
Rohan F said,
October 20, 2010 @ 9:57 am
See, I might have been misinterpreting it (and given the first sentence, I suppose it's quite possible) but I thought the second sentence was quite unremarkable. What I got out of James's sentence was "That's $2,000 for a technical these days, man. [The fine's] not really about the money, but it is [$2,000 for a technical, nevertheless]." If "it's not really about the money" is replaced with a different phrase, you'll see what I mean:
That's $2,000 for a technical these days, man. We're not really that worried about the money, but it is.
So James's second sentence parsed just fine for me. Maybe it's just my mind trying to wring some sense out of it, though; without further contextual clues from the speech in which this utterance was embedded, I can't quite tell one way or the other.
Daniel Barkalow said,
October 20, 2010 @ 1:31 pm
The first one is completely normal if you interpret "really" as "in reality" (as opposed to as "very much"), and exclude imagined offenses from reality. He's avoiding saying that the refs aren't even imagining offenses (and just want to penalize players), while saying that the offenses aren't real.
It seems to me like the second statement is saying that it's not a practical concern, but he objects on principle. (That is, if they officially fined him $2000 and then didn't actually collect the money, he would be no less upset.) I feel like the mechanism is a contrast between an idiomatic reading (or fixed interpretation, anyway) and a completely literal and free meaning. "It's not about the money"="This isn't going to affect my finances"; but then, out-of-game consequences make the issue worth discussing.
Acilius said,
October 20, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
Brett (10:29am) said what I was going to say.
BrianV said,
October 20, 2010 @ 6:42 pm
I've noticed people saying, "I'm not going to say he's ugly but…" or "I don't want to say it was terrible it was just…" but they never finish the sentence. They just sort of trail off, maybe expecting someone else to fill in the blank. Do speakers that do this believe it to be a nicer way of saying something negative?
John G said,
October 23, 2010 @ 6:47 pm
In the first sentence, I take 'really nothing' to mean 'in essence nothing' – the distinction is not between literally and figuratively, but between technically and morally or practically.
outeast said,
October 24, 2010 @ 2:50 pm
The second part makes absolute sense to me; it's exactly the same thing I feel about overpriced beer. The final difference between a few regularly priced beers and a few overpriced beers is pretty much negligible – I might cheerfully pick up a freind's tab costing a lot more than that and not care a jot. But it burns to be ripped off by even a modest amount… the money acquires a diferent kind of value as a representaion of fairness in the transaction. So it isn't about the money, but it is.