{"id":49391,"date":"2020-12-02T08:02:32","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T13:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=49391"},"modified":"2020-12-02T08:52:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T13:52:00","slug":"zero-evidence-ascendent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=49391","title":{"rendered":"\"zero evidence\" ascendent?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>S.H. writes:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Maybe I'm suffering from a recency illusion, but I feel that \"zero\" has begun to replace \"no\".<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I see this often in Washington Post political columns, and here's an <a href=\"https:\/\/robertreich.org\/post\/636337835399692288\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">example from Robert Reich<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Of course, these claims haven\u2019t held up in court because there\u2019s\u00a0<span class=\"il\">zero<\/span>\u00a0<span class=\"il\">evidence<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Checking\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/graph?content=%28no+evidence*1000%29%2C%28zero+evidence*1000000%29&amp;year_start=1960&amp;year_end=2019&amp;corpus=26&amp;smoothing=3\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google Books ngrams<\/a> suggests that \"zero evidence\" is indeed increasing relative to \"no evidence\", but was still about 1000 times less common a decade ago, and is now about 500 times less common in the surveyed sources:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/ZeroEvidence.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/myl\/ZeroEvidence.png\" width=\"490\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>As for the WaPo, \"zero evidence\" is indeed doing better than that, with 319 instances since 2005 relative to 14,757 for \"no evidence\", yielding a ratio of only 46 to 1. This also puts the WaPo well ahead of the NYT, which over the same time period has 87 instances of \"zero evidence\" compared to 13,059 for \"no evidence\", for a ratio of 124 to 1.<\/p>\n<p>The OED's entry for <em><strong>zero<\/strong><\/em> as an adjective gives a sense of \"no, not any\", adding that \"With mass noun. Sometimes, esp. in non-technical contexts, with stronger emphasis, meaning 'absolutely no, no&#8230;whatsoever'\", citing examples back to 1882 (with the recent ones being all journalistic):<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">1882 G. M. Minchin <em>Uniplanar Kinematics<\/em> 25 The surface of still water is agitated by wave disturbances proceeding from three fixed points..: find the points of zero disturbance.<br \/>\n1960 <em>Jrnl. Abnormal &amp; Social Psychol.<\/em> 61 110\/1 A subject indicated zero social distance by stating that he was willing to marry a member of a particular ethnic group.<br \/>\n1962 <em>Times<\/em> 30 Oct. 4\/6 Good design points include \u2018zero torque\u2019.<br \/>\n1981 <em>TV Picture Life<\/em> Mar. 39\/3 Jackie claims they now have \u2018zero communication\u2019.<br \/>\n2015 <em>N.Y. Mag.<\/em> 21 Sept. 20\/1 The Yankees had zero hope for either this year, and each player performed like an all-star.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>S.H. writes: Maybe I'm suffering from a recency illusion, but I feel that \"zero\" has begun to replace \"no\". I see this often in Washington Post political columns, and here's an example from Robert Reich: Of course, these claims haven\u2019t held up in court because there\u2019s\u00a0zero\u00a0evidence. Checking\u00a0Google Books ngrams suggests that \"zero evidence\" is indeed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words-words-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49391"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49397,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49391\/revisions\/49397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}