…"wasted little time VERB.ing"…
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Commenters noted the ambiguity of this sentence quoted earlier today in "Rococo":
When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, he wasted little time redecorating.
From Bob Ladd: "I was genuinely uncertain when I read the sentence about 'wasting little time' whether Trump had in fact gone right to work redecorating or rather had decided not to bother.
Nearly all the examples in COCA of {… wasted little time VERB.ing} or {…wasted no time VERB.ing} have the "went right to work" meaning. There are a few examples like these:
The story goes that while Thomas was laid up with flu, the printer slipped in a phony prediction for July and August of 1816: snow. Hey, it was only a joke. But when Thomas discovered it, he wasted little time laughing. He pulled all the copies he could find and substituted a corrected forecast.
Ormelius wasted no time making threats he couldn't carry out; he simply told the aliens that U.N. forces were inadequate to deal with widespread social chaos of the type we were beginning to see, and pleaded with them to lift the Baby Ban, as the sole means of avoiding a complete breakdown of international order.
But the vast majority — in fact nearly all — are like these:
Sonics coach George Karl wasted little time establishing a new set of rules within the locker room. After Shawn Kemp missed the team charter and an evening practice later that night in Orlando, Karl benched the second-year forward for two games.
On the offensive side of things, the Giants wasted no time getting runs up on the board. They nearly batted around in the first inning, the big hit coming off the bat of Hunter Pence, who doubled to drive in a couple runs.
You can see similar results in a Google News search for "wasted no time" or "wasted little time".
A good homework assignment for a semantics course would be modeling the ambiguity in terms of formal logic. And a good assignment for a discourse-analysis or pragmatics course would be explaining the difference in relative frequency. I wonder whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok can provide sensible answers to those questions? I don't have time to check today, but I'll give it a try at some point if readers don't beat me to it…
Update — several commenters feel strongly that the dominant interpretation of these phrases is a logico-grammatical error. It wouldn't be the first time that we've documented standard quasi-idiomatic meaning reversals — see "Why are negations so easy to fail to miss?", 2/26/2004, and/or some of the other posts in the list at "No post too obscure to escape notice", 11/27/2009. But I'm not convinced — I think that the "got right to it" meaning is logico-grammatically valid, though I don't have time today to provide a detailed argument.
Gregory Kusnick said,
July 6, 2025 @ 2:34 pm
My take is that a literal reading of "wasted little time doing X" is unambiguous, and means more or less the opposite of what it's conventionally understood to mean. The ambiguity arises only because the conventional reading interpolates an elided negation: "wasted little time [not] doing X" or "… [before] doing X".
In some respects it bears a family resemblance to such problematic utterances as "One can't take this too seriously."
Nat said,
July 6, 2025 @ 2:36 pm
What kind of logical system do you use in your semantics class? Second order logic? Model logic? First order logic is going to miss a lot of the logical relationships between “wasting time doing x”, “wasting little time doing x”, “wasting lots of time doing x”, “wasting no time doing x”…. But I think you can capture a lot of that with second order logic.
Nat said,
July 6, 2025 @ 2:39 pm
Sorry,
*modal logic
Nat said,
July 6, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
Probably none of those resources are really necessary. Isn’t the ambiguity, to the degree that there is one (pace Kusnik), just the difference between wasting time by actively doing X and wasting time before beginning X? I wonder if it could possibly be an elliptical form of something like “Don’t waste time in starting X” -> “Don’t waste time in X-ing” -> “Don’t waste time X-ing”. It would be nice to know if there were alternate early forms of the expression.
Nat said,
July 6, 2025 @ 2:59 pm
And I think there’s potential for real ambiguity in what it means to start a project. It could be puttering about, collecting potentially useful resources, mulling over possibilities, procrastinating, essentially. Or it could mean taking concrete, initial steps, truly beginning the project. And “wasting time” in these two different senses of “starting” a project is alternately wasting time by not doing it, or wasting time by engaging in it.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 6, 2025 @ 4:41 pm
I agree with Gregory Kusnick that for many of these you can make them clearer and more straightforwardly "logical" by changing "wasted little time VERBing" to "wasted little time *before* VERBing." But I'm not sure that adding the explicit "before" is really a negation. I would accept that it blocks one potential way to read an ambiguous utterance.