5 ms·
It’s so hard to read, it hurts. But so clever all the same! It’s a true test of “Can you deal with the double negative?”
by glitchc 6y ago
It’s so hard to read, it hurts. But so clever all the same!
It’s a true test of “Can you deal with the double negative?”
- jsinai 6y agoI must admit, I was rather fazed by it at first.
- mgkimsal 6y agoMy English teacher used to tell us that double negatives were a no-no.
- dang 6y agoNice. Reminds me of Sidney Morgenbesser's famous "yeah, yeah": https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/sidney-morgenbesser https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/sid...
- _carbyau_ 6y agoOr the more recent - hopefully only Australian fad to spare suffering - of "Yeah Nah" or "Nah Yeah". https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/07/difference-between-yeah-nah-and-nah-yeah/ https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2020/07/difference-between-yea...
- richardfontana 6y agoSomething apparently similar has been present in American English for many years now. See: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005523.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005523.h...
- foobar1962 6y agoI like the "yeah nah" expression! (It's best when accompanied with a head nod and shake when it's said.) It's saying "I hear what you are saying, but I don't agree" with typical Aussie friendly honesty, with the implication that the proposition was unreasonable (often laughable). Example, "Willing to swap late model Honda Civic for Ferrari or Lamborghini, must be road worthy and registered, cash my way if needed." Yeah, nah.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoLike a lot of communication, it's in the delivery. :-) But a lack of intonation or performance delivery (that head nod or shake) leads to a lot of confusion. Furthermore, in text form it can be downright ambiguous. But I do smile when I hear:"Yeah nah, thanks tho' aay."
- randycupertino 6y agoAccording to my niece, "Yeah, no" is popular now w/ zennials. Also the laughing crying emoji is OUT, to be replaced with the hipper skull emoji to show amusement. As in, this is so funny it killed me.
- polka_haunts_us 6y ago"Yeah, no" was definitely a thing when I was in high school, and that was 10 years ago at this point. Maybe it's one of those all modern youth culture flows from the US West Coast things.
- tingletech 6y agowas a thing when I was in high school in the 1980s in socal
- collyw 6y agoYou should have taken a Spanish class....
- NoodleIncident 6y agoFor some reason this sentence jumps out as being easier to read than the rest; maybe it's the self-deprecation? > I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.
- wwwwewwww 6y agoThere's only one unpaired word antonym in that sentence, the second to last. Rest are regular words, but "negated unpaired idioms", which seem to be easier to read.
- m-ee 6y agoI had trouble overstanding it
- scandox 6y agoWhat about double positives? Anecdote: An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
- cafard 6y agoSome year ago, the obit for a CCNY philosophy professor attributed the counter-example to him. This may be one of those quips that is simply untraceable.