Misnegation plus misaffirmation

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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 better term — keep his foot out of his mouth. 
 
If only!

The quotation is from:

Lauren Martinchek, "So Joe Biden’s Latest Social Media Video is a Joke.  And of course, ridiculously out of touch." Medium (8/6/20)

 

Selected reading



6 Comments

  1. Michael P said,

    August 9, 2020 @ 2:10 pm

    I am not sure I follow the complaint about the quoted text. Wouldn't it be correct if "ability" is changed to "inability", so the writing error is a single misnegation?

  2. Rachael Churchill said,

    August 9, 2020 @ 2:29 pm

    You could even argue that there's no error, if "ability to keep his foot out of his mouth" refers to a scale running from high ability to low or nonexistent ability, in the same way that "luck" can mean either good luck or luck of any kind, or "manners" can mean either good manners or manners of any kind. "He never fails to disappoint with his manners" seems fine to me.

  3. Gregory Kusnick said,

    August 9, 2020 @ 3:53 pm

    If we read it as "his ability to keep his foot out of his mouth is consistently disappointing", then the errors appear to cancel out and it does end up saying something sort of like what Martinchek presumably meant.

  4. Michael Watts said,

    August 9, 2020 @ 5:53 pm

    Yeah, I don't see why this is supposed to be a problem. This looks like two related claims:

    1. "On the rare occasions that his team actually trusts him in front of a camera [i.e. even when he has presumably been exhaustively prepped], the presumptive democratic nominee never ceases to disappoint"

    This appears to be a straightforward statement of the author's intended meaning, unless the intended meaning was to say that Joe Biden is performing surprisingly well at public speaking.

    2. The factor causing him to disappoint is his "his ability to — for lack of a better term — keep his foot out of his mouth", which ability is presumably disappointingly low.

    This also appears to make perfect sense?

  5. Andrew Usher said,

    August 9, 2020 @ 9:05 pm

    It might be technically grammatical, but unintentionally so; clearly what was meant was "never fails to disappoint … with his inability …".

    We don't need to say 'misaffirmation', because 'misnegation' already covers both adding and omitting negatives incorrectly.

    k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com

  6. JPL said,

    August 10, 2020 @ 5:06 am

    This sentence is unclear due to of the choice of "with" at that point where the relation to "disappoint" needs to be expressed: Changing "with" to "because" (see Michael Watts's comment above) makes it clearer that an overt negative is preferable here. So you would change "with his ability to" to "because of his ability to …"? No, rather to "because of his inability to". Did the writer say "with" there because of the habitual collocation "I'm disappointed with the performance because of …"? But I suppose you could have "Biden is constantly disappointing us with his inability to keep his foot out of his mouth for any length of time.", as opposed to "with his ability to keep putting his foot in his mouth", which sarcastically conforms to the idiomatic expression, but clashes with 'disappointing"s needing a judgment of "not up to the mark" as a reason. ("I'm disappointed with his ability to keep putting his foot in his mouth/keep his foot out of his mouth.") So I would say that the mishandling of negation is involved in the unclarity here, although it stays on the right side of the polarity; but that the negative element whose effect is neglected is in the meaning of "disappoint".

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