Language Log

A striking misnegation from Josh Marshall, poetically reflecting his confusion about levels of belief, deception, and presentation in the recent presidential campaign — "Disturbing", TPM 11/12/2012: As you know, the great question that faces the nation today is this: were Republicans, particularly Mitt Romney, really “shell shocked” by the results of Tuesday’s election or is […]

Ben Yagoda spotted a nice case of overnegation on NPR's "Morning Edition" earlier today, when Renee Montagne interviewed political science professor Michael McDonald about early voting. After explaining that Obama was leading in early voting in Nevada, McDonald said, "I don't want to discourage people from not voting today."

In November of 2000, Ted Briscoe interviewed Gerald Gazdar about the history of "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar". In the course of that interview, Gazdar said: That is not to say that I don't think that corpus work can't be useful, even in theoretical syntax. ,,,by which he meant to say that he thinks that corpus […]

Ann Althouse, "There's never been a day in the last four years I've been proud to be his vice president", 11/2/2012: The Weekly Standard (linked by Drudge) thinks it has a hilarious Biden gaffe, but they've misheard/mistranscribed it. You have to have an ear for the "working class"-style mushing of syllables, but he's saying "There's […]

Katie Rogers-Follow, "Facebook is not leaking your private messages – though you once did", The Guardian (US News Blog) 9/24/2012: Monday afternoon, Facebook spokesperson Frederic Wolens added that Facebook hadn't been unable to confirm any issue related to a leakage of private messages. Probably this is just a typo — though at the moment it's […]

Reader MD sent in another contribution to the misnegation archives — Lydia Polgreen, "A Murder Sentence Underlines South African Inequality", New York Times, 8/22/2012: The death of Eugène Terre’Blanche, the leader of the militant white separatist group known as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, seemed an ominous sign that the era of racial harmony that began […]

Reader DM sends in a link for the for the misnegation archives — Evan Ackerman, "NASA: Warp drive is 'plausible and worth further investigation'", DVice 9/17/2012: Warp drive, a staple of science-fiction, has just been deemed "plausible and worth further investigation" by the smart and apparently not crazy people over at NASA. And by way of further investigation, […]

Breffni O'Rourke writes: Here's one for the 'cannot underestimate' files. The publicity material for the recently published Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (which may coincide with the printed blurb or the preface; I haven't been able to check) starts off with (variants of) this: The Great Irish Famine is the most pivotal event in modern Irish […]

Reader PN wrote to comment on the first sentence of  a story by Andres Oppenheimer in the Miami Herald, "US unlikely to condemn Argentina’s ‘outlaw behavior’ — yet", Miami Herald 5/16/2012: A U.S. congressional proposal aimed at expelling Argentina’s populist-leftist government from the G-20 group of the world’s leading economies faces an uncertain future, not […]

Joe Nocera, "A Revolutionary Idea", NYT 2/24/2012: Puritans fled to America in the 1600s because they were being persecuted in England for their hard-edged, Calvinist beliefs, and their rejection of the Anglican Church. Having one’s ears cut off for having deviationist religious beliefs was one of the lesser punishments Puritans suffered; being locked up in […]

Geoff Pullum is, of course, right on the money when he points out that our frequent difficulties in interpreting multiple negations indicate that we are all "semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers." Or, as Mark Liberman once put it, negation often overwhelms our "poor monkey brains." […]

Adam Kilgore and Juan Forero, "Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos kidnapped in Venezuela", Washington Post 11/9/20111: Wilson Ramos, one of the Washington Nationals’ most promising young baseball players, was kidnapped at gunpoint Wednesday night from his family’s home in Venezuela, leaving the team in a state of shock and raising questions about the safety of […]

A couple of weeks ago, Eric Baković posted about phrases of the form deceptively <ADJECTIVE>, and gave the results of an online survey of more than 1500 LL readers ("Watching the deceptive", 10/2/2011), who were each asked to interpret one of two phrases: The exam was deceptively easy. The exam was deceptively hard The exam was […]