Diane Sawyer hedging her bets

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:54 PM -0400 3/22/11, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 3/22/2011 07:31 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>Another reversal:
>>
>>We've discussed, as has Language Log at various intervals, the
>>problems in sorting out "can't underestimate" and its relatives.
>>Here's Diane Sawyer on tonight's episode of ABC World News Tonight on
>>the lead story:
>>
>>"It would be hard to imagine, or underestimate [pause]..., or
>>overestimate, what it must have been like" when those two American
>>airmen were forced to bail out and land in Libya.
>
>It wasn't a very long pause, however, and I thought it might equally
>well have been a tongue slip as a brain slip.
>
>
So she recognized that her "hard to understimate" involved an
unwanted reversal of her intended sense, and self-corrected to "hard
to overestimate"?  Could be; but then it would be a corrected brain
slip and not really a tongue slip per se, wouldn't it?

Here's one LL post by Mark Liberman on the topic, with samples of
relevant usages, slips or not:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1292.  His concluding
observation: "Whenever we combine negation, concepts of possibility
or difficulty, and thresholds on a scale of evaluation, people seem
to get their wires crossed in the same way."

LH

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