Those pesky negatives (revisited)

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:34 PM -0400 8/10/04, Dennis R. Preston wrote

[re Buck Showalter's encomium ''They've never ceased to let us down.'']


>>larry,
>
>
>I have the sneaking suspicion that some not familiar with the sense
>of "negative" you use here may have trouble finding three; I offer
>the following translation:
>
>They've NOT ever NOT continued to NOT live up to our expectations.
>
>Is that right?
>
More or less.  I might go with "begin not" rather than "not continue"
as a paraphrase of "cease", but that's pickiness.

I'm using "negative" here in the same sense as W. B. Hodgson (_Errors
in the Use of English_, New York: Appleton, 1885), who cited examples
like
============
I have but one comfort in thinking of the poor, and that is, that we
get somehow adjusted to the condition in which we grow up, and we do
not miss the absence of what we have never enjoyed.
[Froude, Nemesis of Faith, cited in Hodgson (1885: 218)]

Nothing is too small or too mean to be disregarded by our scientific economy.
[R. H. Patterson, Economy of Capital (1865), cited in Hodgson (1885: 219)]
============
as evidence for his observation that "piled-up negatives prove easy
stumbling-blocks".  My diagnosis of sentences like Showalter's is
"Triplex Negatio Confundit."

larry