Two world renowned linguistic philosophers at a cocktail party are engaged in a one-upsmanship conversation. One is going on about his last two years of research. He states that he was only able to find two languages, one being English, wherein two negatives equal a positive. He further states that in the entire universe there is not a single language wherein two positives equal a negative.
The other snidely replies, “Yeah, yeah.”
Philo
Why did the punk rocker cross the road?
Because he was stapled to the chicken.
Why did the chicken cross the playground?
To get to the other slide.
That isn’t a joke, in fact!
It actually happened at Columbia University
at a philosophy paper.
A speaker said that English
is a language where a double
positive doesn’t equal a
negative. Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser
called from the audience:
‘Yeah, Yeah!’
There are some very clever
professional philosophers.
Morgenbesser’s brilliant response
missed the speaker’s point,
I think.
The speaker is saying
that in English two positives
don’t work to
equal a negative in the
way that two negatives cancel
each other semantically to
equal a positive, as in
‘I will not not eat dinner.’
Morgenbesser’s example is merely an
instance of irony–he could
have just as well said ‘Yeah,
yeah, yeah!’ That still equals
a negative, as does ‘Yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah!’ or a
sarcastic single ‘Yeah!’ Ironic
'yeah’s are all negatives, no
matter how many or few there are.
But when the Beatles sang
‘She loves you–yeah, yeah!’
it meant she really loves
you, not that she doesn’t.
Actually they sang
‘She loves you–yeah, yeah, yeah!’
but maybe we can ignore that.
Yeah!
[ This Message was edited by: jim stone on 2002-10-01 01:22 ]
Well, William Safire has a list of 45 rules, called “Never-Say Neverisms”. Here are just a few:
And finally,
JP
On 2002-10-01 01:02, jim stone wrote:
That isn’t a joke, in fact!
It actually happened at Columbia University
at a philosophy paper.A speaker said that English
is a language where a double
positive doesn’t equal a
negative. Prof. Sidney Morgenbesser
called from the audience:
‘Yeah, Yeah!’
That’s the version of this story I heard Jim. Of course it is a joke, it was hilarious then and still is. It’s just more than a joke.
Morgenbesser was what’s known in the trade as a ‘feared counterexample man.’ People about to give presentations would shudder when they saw him in the audience.
I actually saw something similar in Oxford once. Back in the days of transformational grammer and generative semantics, people would present grammatical proposals and then list (a) the sentences their proposals made grammatical and (b) list with stars against them some sentences that would be ungrammatical according to their proposals. The idea was that if the theory delivered results that matched the intuitions of competent native speakers it was still in the ball park, otherwise not.
A Finnish linguist/philosopher was expounding in halting English a new theory of relative clauses (or whatever) for English. When we got to the test sentences, one unstarred sentence appeared hopelessly ungrammatical to the audience of extremely competent English speakers. (I forget what the sentence was but just come up with a shocker for yourself and you’ll get the idea.) One or two of us gently probed to see if he was really serious. Unfortunately he was. Then one person lost patience. ‘This hall is full of competent English speakers. Let’s take a vote: who thinks sentence 40 is ungrammatical?’ Every hand went up except for that of the speaker.
There was brief silence. Then the lecturer continued in halting English: ‘well MY intuition is that 40 is perfectly good English’.
After the laughter died down he completed the lecture. I still don’t know why we didn’t all walk out. Politeness, I guess.
I’d love to hear a punk or grunge version of ‘She Loves You’ delivered sarcastically. The yeah, yeah, yeahs are perfectly placed for this exercise. I wonder why nobody’s done it.
[ This Message was edited by: Wombat on 2002-10-01 05:15 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Wombat on 2002-10-01 05:17 ]
Right Jim! A friend and colleague told me the story at a retirement party last week (I think he is a friend of either one of the linguists or more probably the “heckler.”) I’d had two drinks and didn’t even remember that night whether this was a joke or a true story. Take care.
Philo
On 2002-10-01 01:38, JohnPalmer wrote:
Well, William Safire has a list of 45 rules, called “Never-Say Neverisms”. Here are just a few:
- Remember to never split an infinitive.
- The passive voice should never be used.
- Don’t use no double negatives.
- Do not put statements in the negative form.
- No sentence fragments.
- And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
- Don’t use contractions in formal writing.
- If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
- Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
- Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
And finally,
- Avoid colloquial stuff
JP
I believe another one, my favorite is,
Eschew obfuscatory morphemes.
Mike
On 2002-09-30 19:54, PhilO wrote:
The other snidely replies, “Yeah, yeah.”
The version I heard the punchline was “yeah…right…”
-David