Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee?

[Wilson Gray]

On Apr 18, 2005, at 10:51 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Nobody Does It Like Sara Lee?
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> At 2:55 PM -0700 4/18/05, Allen Maberry wrote:
>> I could say "everybody dislikes something" but I don't believe I
>> would ever say, "everybody doesn't like something", or "nobody
>> doesn't like X [Sara Lee, apple pie, mom, etc.]" but I could say
>> "nobody dislikes X". I don't have any explanation why that is,
>> unless there is something about inserting "does/doesn't" that makes
>> it sound strange to me when used in these phrases.
>
> I don't think it's the "does" that does it, since the same would
> apply in non-do-support contexts (cf. "Everybody isn't here",
> "Everyone can't come").
>
> Besides the garden path factor I mentioned earlier (the fact that
> "everybody doesn't like X" tends to be interpreted, all things being
> equal, as "not everybody likes X", while this reading is ruled out
> when negation is incorporated into the predicate as in "dislikes"),
> there's the fact that the two readings of the awkward ambiguous
> "Every...not..." statement each has an unambiguous paraphrase that
> tends for this reason to be preferred:  "not everybody likes X" for
> the wide scope, [NOT [EVERY]] negation and "nobody likes X" for the
> narrow scope negation, [EVERY [NOT]].  While "Everybody dislikes X"
> isn't quite a paraphrase of the latter, since it amounts to a
> stronger, contrary negation rather than a simple contradictory of
> "Somebody likes X"*, it does unambiguously have narrow-scope negation
> and thus doesn't suffer from one fatal flaw of "Everybody doesn't
> like X".
>
> A possible paraphrase of the full Sara Lee ditty which doesn't suffer
> from the ambiguity flaw is "Everybody has something they don't like
> (...but for nobody is that something Sara Lee)".  I guess it has
> other flaws, though.
>
> larry
>
> *disliking is stronger than simply not-liking, so that "Nobody likes
> X" can be true while "Everybody dislikes X" is false, namely if
> nobody has a favorable opinion toward X while some people just feel
> sort of wishy-washy about X.  The former amounts essentially to the
> non-existent "Everybody not-likes X".
>

Didn't someone once speculate that the colored probably couldn't
understand this slogan because of the use of the double negative in
"Nobody doesn't like...," since two negatives don't make a positive in
non-standard English? That is, the slogan would be interpreted as a
version of "Do(es)n't nobody like..."

-Wilson Gray