fun with negatives

[Jonathan Lighter]

Cf.:

A: Robin, you can't drive for sh*t!!

B: Robin, you drive for sh*t!!

These are synonymous in my idiolect, but perhaps not in everyone's.  Is
there anyone who finds B ungrammatical (by standards of common usage, of
course)? If so, that would render the statement more readily intelligible.

John surely has identified the sentiment:

"I'm a good driver, and you're paranoid."

I think, however, that he's done so in spite of the *apparent* grammar and
semantics of the statement.  Part of the problem too be the poet's
(possible) loose application of "paranoid" in the sense of simply "crazy." I
can't say that I'm familiar with that usage.

There's also may be an odd and confusing assumption that the reader's
"paranoia" could actually, somehow, be a cause of the driver's
ability/inability to "drive for sh*t!!"

JL

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:11 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: fun with negatives
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Interesting.  I agree with you on the problem with interpretation.  At
> first glance, this seems like a hypernegation, i.e. it "should" be
>
> > JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN I CAN DRIVE FOR SH*T!!
>
>
> But this is impossible, because "can drive for shit" only occurs with an
> adjacent negation--at least it sounds weird to me to say "It's not true that
> Robin can drive for shit" or "I doubt Robin can drive for shit" meaning
> "Robin can't drive for shit".  So the negation in "CAN'T" has to stay for
> what follows, yet the other negation has to stay too, because the relevant
> expression it plays off is the one we've discussed earlier:
>
> JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID (IT) DOESN'T MEAN THEY'RE NOT AFTER YOU!
>
> So the best we could do with the below would be something like
>
> > JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT THE CASE THAT I CAN'T
> DRIVE FOR SH*T!!
>
>
> which is too long to fit on a legible bumper sticker.  Life is hard!
>
> LH
>
>
>
> On Oct 5, 2011, at 12:34 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > The other day I picked up a book called _Impounded_, published
> anonymously a
> > few years ago in Maine.
> >
> > Though sold in book stores_Impounded_ is, in point of fact, a thick pad
> of
> > adhesive bumper stickers designed especially to be applied by you -
> covertly
> > of course - to other people's bumpers. But that's neither here nor there.
> > One of the stickers bears the following message:
> >
> > JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DOESN'T MEAN I CAN'T DRIVE FOR SH*T!!
> >
> > This utterance seems to be grammatical, but I confess it baffles me.  Can
> or
> > cannot "I" (the driver-victim) "drive for sh*t"?  If so, is that good or
> > bad? What effect does the reader-dupe's asserted paranoia have upon the
> > driver-victim's ability to drive (or not to drive) "for sh*t"?
> >
> > In the Future, moreover, all hard-copy books will be pads of adhesive
> bumper
> > stickers. Bumper stickers facilitate rapid recall, enable instant
> > comprehension (except in this case), and, unlike the primitive books of
> > today, enable the reader instantly to share his or her new insights with
> the
> > great world at large, and in permanent form.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org