not a significant surprise

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Thu Nov 10 18:01:52 UTC 2011


Let's see how much mileage I can get out of this one:

http://goo.gl/CntUp
> "The fourth quarter is likely to worsen further," said William Power,
> an analyst at Robert W. Baird. "Driven by iPhone 4S competition, the
> company warned of a challenging fourth quarter, which is *not a
> significant surprise*."

This seems to be a /semantic/ blind alley ;-) What's being negated here?
Is is a significant non-surprise? An insignificant surprise? Or a
distributive insignificant non-surprise? The context seems to suggest
that it's not a surprise at all but YMMV.

     VS-)

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