Here are some items sent in by readers over the past few weeks, to add to our list of misnegations. Larry Horn, on ADS-L: "We'll see the fate of the coaching staff of Dallas…This cannot be understated, though, or overstated: whether it's his fault or not, Tony Romo is now 1-6 in win or go […]
John Podheretz, tweeting about Wayne LaPierre's proposal to put armed guards in every American school: The awful part of what LaPierre just did is until he spoke there was nothing uncontroversial about having security at schools — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 21, 2012 When he wrote "… there was nothing uncontroversial about …", he clearly meant […]
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, […]
From Lauri Karttunen (via Arnold Zwicky): I have come to realize that there are a lot of examples on the web of the type "not want to not X" that seem to say the opposite of what they mean. Here are a few: She failed to give the patient CPR and turned an ambulance away […]
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." […]
I am quite certain that the reviewer kiwi78 was trying to do good things for the Nahm restaurant in Knightsbridge, a district of south-west London. But the comment left at the Bookatable.com site's page about Nahm actually said that the restaurant "never fails to disappoint." Think about it for a moment. For the restaurant, that's […]
Permalink Comments off
From ABC World News, 3/22/2011, in a segment on the rescue of the downed American F-15 pilots in Libya, Diane Sawyer observes (about 6:55 into the program): Your browser does not support the audio element. And it is hard to imagine or to underestimate or overestimate what it took in those heart-pounding moments when the […]
"Pope condones condom use in exceptional cases", BBC News, 11/20/2010: Catholic commentator Austen Ivereigh said that although this was the first time the Pope had voiced such an opinion, it was in line with what Catholic moral theologians have been saying for many years. "The Church's teaching on contraception predates the discovery of Aids," Mr […]
From a letter to the editor in the Nov. 8 New Yorker: Such rhetoric then [by left-wing critics of George W. Bush] was hardly less corrosive, or less supported by scholarly reasoning, than the crackpot vitriol now spewed by Beck and his ilk. As we've noted many times, combinations of negation and scalar predicates are […]
Is the young soccer player Jack Wilshere ready to start playing on the England team? Don't dig into your sports knowledge, because this is Language Log, not Soccer Log, and we are interested in what Arsene Wenger (coach of Wilshere's team, Arsenal) said in answer to this question. According to Reuters (take a deep breath […]
At least twice here on Language Log, we've looked at combinations of negation and exclusion that might be seen as overnegation (exclusion being a covert negative).
Permalink Comments off
I wrote in my posting on "forbidden OSR": Every so often we post about some comprehensible examples that strike us and our correspondents as unacceptable — examples like ["the well is forbidden to play near"] — and then our task is to try to decide whether these examples are all inadvertent errors, or whether at […]