Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee?

[Laurence Horn]

>I gave my intro to lx students a question on a recent test requiring
>analysis of the advertising slogan, "Nobody Doesn't Like Sara Lee." It
>turned out that until they saw the words on the test - and checked some
>URLs -- some of them thought the slogan was "Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee."
>
>(We never know what we are really teaching, do we?)
>
That's interesting to know.  I've given my students the task of
translating the full jingle--

Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee.

--as an exercise in my Intro Semantics class (when we're doing the
fortnight on predicate logic).  Besides the logical double negation,
there's that nice complexity of scope relations in the first clause.
Nobody's ever mentioned the alternate understanding, but I suppose a
lot of them (especially the foreign students) are entirely unfamiliar
with the slogan in any form.

Larry