Larry Horn posted this to the American Dialect Society's mailing list a couple of days ago: One of the bêtes noires of the prescriptivists is "miss not Xing" in the sense of 'miss Xing'. Here, for example, is Lederer: Let's look at a number of familiar English words and phrases that turn out to mean […]
Connoisseurs of misnegation will not be surprised by cases where an author who uses three or four negatives in one proposition finishes up with one too many. Thus Jessica McGregor Johnson, Remembering Perfection – Everyday Inspiration for Living Your Spirituality, 2008: It is also true that we are afraid of our emotions. Part of us […]
Wikipedia's article on the Cornish language (the Brythonic Celtic language once spoken in the county of Cornwall, England) quotes this sentence (twice, in fact) from Henry Jenner, author of Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904): There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish […]
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Dick Margulis writes: An NPR reporter this morning, talking about people in Libya: "…have never spoken to a Western reporter, much less seen one." I hear this frequently (although I don't recall reading it). It is a reversal of what was intended: "have never seen a Western reporter, much less spoken to one." This occurs […]
From a Livescience.com article (about a police chief who recommends keystroke-logging your kids to obtain their passwords so you can find out where they go online) comes this disastrous tangle of a sentence, which will take hours of police time to clear up: "When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I […]
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"In no uncertain terms" is an idiom in which the "no" and the "un-" cancel, so that the result means something like "in very specific and direct language", "very clearly", "in a strong and direct way", or perhaps "emphatically". In other words, "in no uncertain terms" means "in certain terms", construing "certain" as in certainty. […]
In the comments section of yesterday's post on "Gov. Cuomo and our poor monkey brains", it was noted that some examples of misnegation translate into Russian, French, and Spanish. This observation deserves a post of its own, since it helps us to distinguish among the possible explanations for the phenomena in question.
My latest reader response for The New York Times Magazine's On Language column tackles a turn of phrase that has come up on Language Log many times: cannot be underestimated. The occasion is New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's inaugural address earlier this month, in which the governor used the magic phrase twice (and talked […]
From Paul Kay, this passage from an email recently sent by the Chair of the UC Berkeley Academic Senate: As background, the state continues to anticipate a very large deficit this year. While the Governor's budget did call for restoring approximately $300M in funds cut last year from the UC budget, it would probably not […]
An interesting misnegation was broadcast today on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, in a segment under the title "Exactly How Do We Go Forth and Innovate". Liane Hansen quoted president Obama's SOTU passage about innovation and leadership in science and technology, including the phrase "Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of […]
Following up on my post about the often-puzzling semantics of the pattern "No NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB", here's an up-to-date list of LL postings on a cluster of related topics, which I will keep updated as the years roll by:
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John V. Burke wrote to draw my attention to a phrase in Walter Kaiser's "Saving the Magic City", NYRB, 12/3/2009 (emphasis added): Roeck's book, for which he has done an impressive amount of research, tries to be a number of things at once: it is an account of the social and intellectual world of the […]