No X is better than Y
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The following sentence in this Bloomberg story
I’m of the mindset that no car payment is better than a new car payment – hence why my 2017 Volvo will likely stick around for a few more years – but I’ve been enticed more about the electric vehicles on the market.
…could lead the reader down a garden path of wondering why a new car payment is the best car payment.
A bit of poking around on english-corpora.org turns up plenty of relevant examples, including this common analog of the garden-path version:
No time is better than now.
…which could be translated into Heavy English as something like
It is not the case that there exists a time t such that t is better than the present time.
Or in other words, the present time is the best time.
The Bloomberg writer, of course, didn't mean that a new car payment is the best car payment. Instead, he meant something like
The state of having no car payment is better than the state of having a new car payment.
A search turns up many analogous patterns, e.g. in the "No car payment is better than a new car payment" direction:
No deal is better than a bad deal.
No job is better than a low-paying job.
No sideburns are better than patchy ones.
"No options are better than meh options," says some old Chinese proverb, probably.
In the "No time is better than now" direction, we find things like
No country is better than Nigeria.
For a border, no sedge is better than C. conica 'Marginata', a spectacular white sedge edged in green.
No place is better than the West Lake in terms of the combined beauty of mountains and lake.
No country is better than we are at talking ourselves into a depression.
No words are better than those words that preach the way to God.
I was surprised and impressed that GPT-5 does an excellent job of translating such sentences into predicate logic, with the ambiguities correctly resolved.
And GPT-5 does equally well at translating (the logically different sentence) "No man is better than any other man".
This takes us out of "stochastic parrot" territory, it seems to me…
Roscoe said,
August 14, 2025 @ 10:35 am
From an old list of “ambiguous job recommendations”: “I can assure you that no person would be better for the job.”
Seonachan said,
August 14, 2025 @ 11:22 am
There's the old joke about preferring a ham sandwich to eternal happiness (because nothing is better than eternal happiness, and a ham sandwich is better than nothing).
There was also an old SNL skit where host Ed Asner plays a retiring supervisor of a nuclear plant, and his parting advice to his colleagues is "You can never put too much water into a nuclear reactor", which later leads to a heated debate followed by a meltdown.
Russinoff said,
August 14, 2025 @ 11:41 am
I find it difficult to interpret "No sideburns are better than patchy ones" to mean anything other than that the best sideburns are patchy, wheras the intended meaning might be conveyed by "No sideburns is better than patchy ones".
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 14, 2025 @ 11:55 am
The sideburns example strikes me as particularly weird since it asks us to visualize something in a state of nonexistence.
SlideSF said,
August 14, 2025 @ 12:46 pm
I was struck more by the enticed about construction than by the garden path down which I was led.
Jim said,
August 14, 2025 @ 1:40 pm
"Nothing works better than Bayer."
Philip Taylor said,
August 14, 2025 @ 2:38 pm
Another "ambiguous job recommendation" — "you will be very lucky if you can get this man to work for you".
Roscoe said,
August 14, 2025 @ 3:52 pm
Mad Magazine once published a parodic paean to failure in the corporate world, titled “There’s No Business Like No Business.”
ohwilleke said,
August 14, 2025 @ 4:35 pm
"I was surprised and impressed that GPT-5 does an excellent job of translating such sentences into predicate logic, with the ambiguities correctly resolved."
I'm not surprised at all. This is literally what LLMs do. They deal with language based upon the meaning that a phrase is customarily given in a particular context, rather than by using grammatical rules to reason something out. It is about rote mastery of every phrase as an exception, rather than about learning a general rule with exceptions.
JPL said,
August 14, 2025 @ 5:24 pm
If making the distinction is necessary in conversation, you don't need formal logic or "heavy English" to make it. The Bloomberg writer could have said something like, "Having no car payment at the end of the month is better than having a new car payment at the end of the month." The "garden path" sense could be expressed with, "There is no car payment that is better than a new car payment". And so on. Sometimes journalists dispense with valuing precise expression in the interest of pithiness (or of course "punchiness"). (Or is that "interests"?)
Brandon Seah said,
August 14, 2025 @ 6:15 pm
The examples above analogous to "no car payment" have adjectives or modifiers before the X is repeated, i.e. "no X is better than (something) X", whereas it is the "no time" examples that follow the "no X is better than Y" pattern in the title of this post.
It is easy to find counterexamples but perhaps there is a correlation here.
Coby said,
August 14, 2025 @ 6:46 pm
Another ambiguous negation, which I found in today's Washington Post column by Ishaan Tharoor about the civil war in Sudan: a reference to "nonethinc Arabs". I think what is meant is non[ethnic Arabs], but the writing doesn't make it clear. (Can Arabs be nonethnic?)
Joe said,
August 14, 2025 @ 7:57 pm
I think it depends on emphasizing the word "no" in a way that doesn't transcribe well (in a publication that doesn't let you use formatting for emphasis):
"I’m of the mindset that *no* car payment is better than a new car payment"
KeithB said,
August 14, 2025 @ 9:04 pm
Not sure if this fits here, but Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings:
“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
wgj said,
August 14, 2025 @ 9:36 pm
I usually add the word "other" to disambiguate: No other (kind of) car payment is better than a new car payment". And the other sense can be disambiguated, in this case, by adding "having": Having no car payment is better than having a new one.
Bob Ladd said,
August 15, 2025 @ 12:28 am
What Joe said. I think that in speech many of these would be disambiguated intonationally, although thinking through examples I find it hard to be sure.
JPL said,
August 15, 2025 @ 1:58 am
In spoken mode the expression of the two senses is distinguishable by intonation contour (contrastive stress on "no" vs "new"; prominence of the whole NP on both, but higher pitch on the first), but the problem in the OP was distinguishing and describing the two senses in written mode without bold or italic fonts. (When I said "conversation" above, I meant writing in conversational style, not necessarily spoken mode.) As always, it's the existence of the ambiguity that is interesting. Why is that?
ajay said,
August 15, 2025 @ 3:03 am
Another ambiguous negation, which I found in today's Washington Post column by Ishaan Tharoor about the civil war in Sudan: a reference to "nonethinc Arabs". I think what is meant is non[ethnic Arabs], but the writing doesn't make it clear. (Can Arabs be nonethnic?)
I can think of two situations in which you could have someone who could be described as a [non-ethnic] Arab.
1) If I define "Arab" as "speaking Arabic as a first language" – which is a fairly common definition, I think – and I am looking at a guy who was born in China of Chinese parents, looks typically Chinese, but was adopted and brought up in Cairo by Egyptian parents. He would be an Arab linguistically, but he wouldn't be of the ethnic group that people typically think of as Arab.
2) In the UK "ethnic" is, unfortunately, widely used to mean "having qualities typically associated with ethnic minorities". People talk about ethnic food, ethnic music etc. So a thoroughly Westernised Egyptian – speaks perfect English, wears a suit and so on – might be an Arab (because he's still an Egyptian, after all) but a "nonethnic" one.
Bob Ladd said,
August 15, 2025 @ 6:01 am
The intonational differences (outlined by JPL) are important. For readers who have been thinking about intonation for a long time: the difference between the two meanings can be signalled by the intonational distinction on “Anna came with Manny” as studied by Liberman & Pierrehumbert in their 1984 paper. The meaning “I’d prefer NO car payment to a new car payment” is signalled (as JPL puts it) by “prominence of the whole NP on both, but higher pitch on the first”, i.e. the contour that in the Anna/Manny sentence gives the interpretation “It was Anna who came with Manny”.
However, there’s also a fairly consistent non-intonational difference between the two structures that can be seen in the list of examples in the OP. Most of the ones with the “I’d prefer NO car payment …” interpretation involve repetition of the noun or noun phrase that follows “no” (deal, job, options, etc.), or at least a similar structure (e.g. “patchy ones”). Most of the ones with the “No time is better than now” type of interpretation typically have a noun or noun phrase that refers to an EXEMPLAR of the set of things designated by the noun or noun phrase that follows “No” in the first phrase: Nigeria is a country, C. conica 'Marginata' is a type of sedge, West Lake is a place, and so on. Repetition of the noun in the two noun phrases favours the first type of interpretation; set/exemplar relation between the first and second noun phrase favours the second. This may be what the LLM is using to understand which interpretation is intended.
Robert Coren said,
August 15, 2025 @ 9:39 am
Then there's the exchange in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-glass between the White King and the messenger who says he saw nobody on the road; the King, observing that the messenger has arrived but Nobody has not, asserts that Nobody walks slower than the messenger, to which the latter takes offense.
Rodger C said,
August 15, 2025 @ 10:04 am
My guess is that "ethnic Arab" is a common phrase when talking about the Sudanese population.
JimG said,
August 15, 2025 @ 11:11 am
@Coby asks Can Arabs be nonethnic?
Oh, yes! A prominent member of a non-muslim religious denomination, with 16th Century roots established in the Middle East, from families who are careful to marry within the religion and the region, living and very assimilated in a Muslim Country, reacted very sharply against my offhandedly including them with non-Arabs in their country.
KevinM said,
August 15, 2025 @ 11:17 am
No news is good news. Meaning either that the assumption of good news is the default, or that there is no such thing as good news.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 15, 2025 @ 6:47 pm
There's a reference to the "nonethnic Arab communities" of the eastern Sudan in this article from some decades back, but it appears to be a fairly rare locution and if the referent is in fact an important thing to talk about when discussing the Sudan, I suspect there may be other labels used more commonly. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3819917
JPL said,
August 17, 2025 @ 2:16 am
In answer to nobody who asked "why do you think it's the existence of the ambiguity that is always interesting?"
For example, on a repeat airing of SNL tonight, Tom Hanks, while sitting in a leather chair in the opening "monologue", said, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I've done so many documentaries, whenever I sit in a leather chair, I just naturally assume I'm IN one." Immediately the assertion "He IS [in one]." occurred in my head. But my propositional content had a reference to what he was sitting in, although the EXPRESSION in my head could have equally truly been a denial, and referred to the type of program he was in, expressible overtly as, "He's NOT [in one].". So the assertion and its negation are both true of the one objective situation referred to, at the same time.
JPL said,
August 17, 2025 @ 2:25 am
Clarification: In the above comment, I perhaps should have said, " … EXPRESSION that could have occurred in my head …" (contrastive stress on "could".)
JPL said,
August 17, 2025 @ 2:42 am
The ambiguity does not involve the referent of "one" directly; the ambiguity involves whether the word "one" is substituting for the phrase "leather chair" or for the word "documentary". There's never ambiguity in propositions. It's always the expression.
Robert Coren said,
August 17, 2025 @ 9:32 am
@JPL: "In answer to nobody who asked 'why do you think it's the existence of the ambiguity that is always interesting?'"
The White King, again, in paraphrase: I wish I had such ears, to hear a question asked by Nobody.
JPL said,
August 17, 2025 @ 5:11 pm
@ Robert Coren: Indeed. Of course, if I had been trying to avoid ambiguity, which I was not, then I would have inserted a comma after "nobody"; but what about the other interpretation? (I.e., how might I have disambiguated that one, without resorting to formal logic or "heavy English"?)
I don't think I've yet fully understood the Hanks example. The ambiguity of the sentence is carried over to the affirmation ("He IS in one.") and to the denial ("He's NOT in one."), but as expressions, differing only in the affirmative/ negative element, they are both true of the situation described by the sentence. But the fun depends on the fact that the propositions expressed by the positive and negative responses differ not only wrt positive/negative, but also wrt something else, having to do with the ambiguity of the use of "one", as that relates to Hanks's sentence. But the question, "how is ambiguity possible?" is a puzzle for which a flip answer will not do.