Head over heels

[Mark Mandel]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> Of course there's a whole range of cases involving hyponegation,
> whether or not there's a (conscious?) element of irony, ranging from
> "could care less" to "That'll teach you", "fat chance", "near miss",
> not to mention hypernegation ("miss not" and its buddies), all
> discussed at length here and especially on Language Log.
>
>
"That'll teach you": I assume you mean the non-negated form, as in
 -  "Ah-CHOO!"
    "That'll teach you (*not) to go shoveling snow without a hat."

"near miss" has another explanation: It missed, but it came pretty close.
Here "near" functions as in "near neighbor" (an X that is near to...),
rather than ~= "nearly a miss".

m a m

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