Diane Sawyer hedging her bets

[Jonathan Lighter]

She misoverestimated the difficulty.

JL

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 10:16 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>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: Diane Sawyer hedging her bets
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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