The text for today, from the excerpts (in the NYT yesterday) from Sarah Palin’s statement resigning as governor of Alaska:
I’ve never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this — to make a difference, to help people.
My comment here is on the nor of nor anyone else. I would probably have used or myself, but Palin’s usage isn’t non-standard. But some commenters have had qualms about nor in cases like this.
Posted in Negation, Semantics, Usage | 3 Comments »
Back on 23 May on ADS-L, I noted an occurrence (in speech) of “The military can do so much”, clearly intended to mean, in the context, ‘the military can do only so much’ (i.e., not everything, or not a lot, while “the military can do so much” otherwise conveys ‘the military can do a lot’). Not long after, a poster wrote:
If “can do so much” can actually mean “can do only so much”, then perhaps Churchill really meant “Never have only so few owed only so much to only so many”? I don’t think so. The sentence really needs “only” in there to make sense.
This is one version of the “X can’t mean Y” (sometimes “X doesn’t mean Y”) reaction to reports that some people sometimes use X to mean Y: flat rejection of the pairing of form X with meaning Y, usually on the basis that the objector wouldn’t use X that way (grammatical egocentrism). Note that the objection is framed as statement of fact (about the language in general, not just about the objector’s variety of the language), though actually it serves as a normative judgment (that X shouldn’t be used to mean Y).
Posted in Attitudes, Negation, Usage | 1 Comment »
Some sentence that began “It is impossible not to ignore” went past me on the radio while I was half asleep yesterday. By the time I started thinking about the sentence, I’d lost the context, but it seemed very likely that the sentence was an instance of overnegation, probably intended to convey ‘it is impossible to ignore’, but with an extra negative element, the explicit negator not (in addition to impossible and ignore, where the negation is “incorporated” into a word). Language Log has been looking at overnegations (and undernegations) for some time — an inventory of postings on overnegation, up through 5/18/07, can be found here — but “impossible not to ignore” seems not to have been recorded there (though other overnegation types with impossible or ignore in them have been). So this posting is a modest addition to the overnegation literature.
Posted in Negation | Leave a Comment »
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