Heard on [adult swim]: "street" to "alley"?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:22 AM +0800 5/21/09, Randy Alexander wrote:
>On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>  There's even a negative form of the expression:
>>
>>  "This is not un-up your alley."
>>  (Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997, p. 202)
>
>Isn't that more of a double-negative form?
>
>--

Indeed, and like many instances of the "not un-" construction the
negative prefixal form it contains ("un-up one's alley") may not be
widely attested without that additional negation.  I see googling
["un-up" + alley] only two relevant hit, one involving a paper of
mine citing this datum and the other a google books result for
_Underworld_.

Another contender for this status was a datum I had for "You're not
uncute", but it turns out there are a bunch of other hits for
"uncute" without that extra "not", although many are of the form "far
from uncute".

LH

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