Lots of nots
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Ron Irving sent in this sentence from Will Bunch's latest Philadelphia Inquirer column ("Proud Boys’ only ‘idea’ is violence. Penn State is wrong to give its leader a platform", 10/13/2022):
What’s more, it’s hard not to think that McInnes and his allies didn’t choose both their location — State College, on a campus surrounded by the counties that went so heavily for Trump in the last two elections — and the timing (15 days ahead of two of the nation’s most-watched midterm elections) with the idea not of winning converts through their “humor,” but with the hope of fomenting even more violence.
Ron's comment: "So Will is saying 'it’s easy to think that McInnes didn’t choose the location and timing with the hope of fomenting even more violence'? One too many negations, I’d say."
Unlike many examples of misnegation, this one seem pretty clear. It helps if we strip out the long parentheticals, and fix the parallelism at the end ("with the idea of not … but with the hope of .." → "not with the idea of … but with the hope of …":
It’s hard not to think that McInnes and his allies didn’t choose both their location and the timing, not with the idea of winning converts, but with the hope of fomenting even more violence.
And then, as Ron suggests, we can turn "It's hard not to think that …" into "It's easy to think that…":
It's easy to think that McInnes and his allies didn’t choose both their location and the timing, not with the idea of winning converts, but with the hope of fomenting even more violence.
…and we can even isolate the concluding prepositional phrase:
It's easy to think that McInnes and his allies didn’t choose both their location and the timing with the hope of fomenting even more violence.
Those simplifications reinforce the "poor monkey brains" theory of misnegation — though behind the obscuring complexities, this case also illustrates the survival (or rebirth) of negative concord in (formal as well as vernacular) English.
The obligatory screenshot:
Ed Rorie said,
October 14, 2022 @ 7:30 am
It’s better to state what you think, rather than what you don’t not think. If you’re itching to accuse someone of something, just do it. "What’s more, it’s likely that McInnes and his allies chose their location (a campus surrounded by counties that went heavily for Trump in the last two elections) and timing (15 days ahead of two of the nation’s most-watched midterm elections) not to win converts through their “humor,” but to foment even more violence.” I did a little value-added editing along the way.
David L said,
October 14, 2022 @ 10:08 am
@Ed Rorie: your version is indeed perfectly clear, but it elides the cheap rhetorical trick of the original. If a newspaper columnist says "it's likely that…" then any reader can say, well, that's, like, just your opinion, man.
Whereas if you say "it's hard not to think that…" you are implying that only a perverse and dimwitted reader could possibly disagree.
I'm not saying this kind of inversion makes for great prose, but the aim is to give the writer's opinion a spurious appearance of objectively.
David L said,
October 14, 2022 @ 10:09 am
*objectivity (but you knew that)
Ed Rorie said,
October 14, 2022 @ 11:31 am
@David L: The writer should be willing, as I already suggested, to take responsibility for his opinion. I agree that eliminating the misnegation seems to also eliminate the weaseling.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 14, 2022 @ 12:45 pm
The way the spatial distribution of partisan preference works these days, America is full of Democratic-leaning counties dominated by a college town entirely surrounded by Republican-leaning rural counties w/o a comparable critical mass of left-leaning students/faculty/etc. It's not like Centre Co., Pa. (home of Penn State) is unusual that way – you can find numerous examples across the country. Assuming McInnes et al. were looking for a university setting, the odds of ending up at a campus in that sort of political/geographical situation are high enough that it's quite easy to think it wasn't deliberate. I accept that's not what the writer was trying to say, though …
Jonathan Smith said,
October 16, 2022 @ 1:01 pm
Just picked up Panera bagel, naturally "not unsliced" + toasted