It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. No fear: sorrow is native—only joy is borrowed. The word that interests us is Common Germanic. Its cognates have been attested in all the Old Germanic languages: in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic. Outside Germanic, even in the ancient Tocharian language, an apparently related noun turned up, though there it means “disease.”
Satisfied but not sad. The English Glutton. Public domain via Picryl.
Words designating abstract concepts usually have concrete foundations. For example, sad goes back to the idea of “sated; weary.” Dutch zat and German satt still refer to a full stomach (among other things), and Latin satis (as in the root of the English borrowings satiated and satisfaction) means “enough.” Sad “melancholy, unhappy,” it appears, has a most prosaic foundation. Attempts to find a similar concrete foundation of sorrow have been less than fully satisfactory, to use the polite jargon of disgruntled etymologists.
However, one thing is almost certain: sorrow is related to neither sore nor sorry, while those two words are indeed related to each other. Yet for centuries, sorrow, sore, and sorry have formed a union and influenced one another. It is quite natural that speakers looked upon such similar-sounding words referring to similar concepts as related. To repeat, the sense of sorrow developed from “physical pain” to “grief.”
The origin of many ancient names of diseases and physical defects is obscure for an important reason. People were afraid to pronounce frightening words. The situation is familiar: talk of the devil and he will come. For instance, someone will say wolf (cry wolf, as it were) or bear, and the beast, which of course knows its name, will hear it, take it for an invitation, and arrive. That is why Germanic has bear, that is, “a brown one,” rather than some continuation of ursus, and Russian has medved, literally, “someone searching for and knowing honey.” For the same reason, the etymology of ache is almost impenetrable. Taboo names were meant to be undecipherable, and they often remain such to us. (By the way, from an etymological point of view, ill is one of the most obscure English words.)
I have mentioned taboo for a reason. Among some rather secure Slavic and Lithuanian cognates of sorrow (Tocharian has already been mentioned) we find a few words meaning “disease, sickness” and “to be sick, ill.” The most problematic forms related to sorrow are those beginning with sw-. Among the Old Highs German words, the verb sworgen turns up. Where is the initial sw– from? The w after s is not accidental here. Also, a secure Albanian cognate once began with sw-, and the first syllable of a rather probable Sanskrit cognate was sū-.
It is rather likely that also the Old Germanic root of sorrow once began with sw– and later lost w under the influence of its “twin” word sorrow. The group sw– is often sound–imitative and sound-symbolic. Consider the following list of Modern English words beginning with sw– (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in writing): swab “mop” (15), swagger (16; swag also exists), swank (19), swarm (Old English), swarm “climb” (16), swash (16), sway (16), sweep (14), swell (Old English), swift (Old English), swig (17), swill (Old English), swindle (18), swing (partly Old English), swipe (19), swirl (18), swish (18), switch (16), swither “to hesitate” (16), swoon (13), and swoop (16).
In the sw-world: a swarm of bees. Photograph by Sichy007. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I realize that reading word lists is not the most entertaining occupation in the world. But I needed a background for my hypothesis. I suggest that sorrow or rather Old English sorg ~ sorh and its Germanic cognates, all of which sounded almost the same, were “emotional” sw-words. It is hard to tell what this sw– alluded to (perhaps sometimes to the loss of balance and erratic movement: consider swing, sway, swipe, and the rest). Above, I did not mention swamp, a late word in English (17). It has always meant “low-lying wet ground,” and swamps are not good to walk in.
Later, sorrow, Sorge, and their likes influenced sworg-, all of which survived but lost none of their emotional impact. Etymologies of this type cannot be proved: they are not theorems. But considering that dictionaries are happy with the statement “ultimate origin unknown,” I see no harm in offering my hypothesis. If I am right, taboo probably played no role in the history of sorrow, but emotion did: it shaped its origin, and chance modified its ultimate form.
As is well-known, people are afraid of two things: of venturing to say something new and of repeating something so trivial that it needs no proof. Above, I committed both sins. English etymological dictionaries do not begin their story of sorrow with sw-. Yet in other sources, matter-of-fact references to sw– in this context are common. Among other places, I found them in the earlier editions of the main German etymological dictionary and in the writings of the great French scholar Antoine Meillet. Thus, I said something that is new (no one has explained the variation s- ~ sw-) but not earth-shattering. If some historical linguists decide to comment on my reconstruction, the first thing for them to do will be to reread F. O. Lindeman’s paper in Indogermanische Forschungen 98, 1993, 48-54, and the chapter “Sorga” in the 1957 book by Heinrich Götz Leitwörter des Minnesangs (pp. 93-105). The absence of comments will give me much sorrow.
With Frau Sorge, two forgotten books. Both are good reading. Courtesy of the British Library. Public domain via Flickr.
In the meantime, I’ll mention a novel titled Frau Sorge (that is, “Lady Sorrow”) by Hermann Sudermann. Today, few people have heard of it. Yet the epoch described in that book is worth remembering. At one time, I read many such sad books, including John Greenwood’s novel The True History of a LittleRagamuffin.Maxim Gorky read and admired it in his youth.
A few remarks on sorry may not be out of place here. Its Old English form was sārig “pained at heart,” as defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (thus, with a long vowel in the root). Later, that is, in Middle English, ā changed to ō (it did so in all words: hence stān to stōn and stone) and was shortened before the “heavy suffix” -ig. This is when sorry began to interact with sorrow.
The title of today’s essay is from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I preferred it to the trodden-to-death more in sorrowthan in anger. Familiar quotations with sorrow are numerous. I will finish this post with my favorite lines by Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”
Postscript. My thanks are to Martin Smith for citing German bergen “to protect” in connection with the post on burg (April 1, 2026) and to Ian Richie, who cited the place from Rob Roy, to which I referred in the post for April 15, 2026. See the comments following those posts.
NOTE. For scheduling reasons, the next post will appear two weeks from today.
Featured image: La Mélancolie by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder. It is frustrating that the origin of hog is unknown. The word surfaced in MiddleEnglish, and it would seem that a relatively recent monosyllabic animal name (and hog always had only one syllable) need not give language historians too much trouble. But this is not the case, as the history of dog (Old English) and hog (Middle English) shows. All we can know for certain is that twelve and six, and three centuries ago, people coined words, motivated by the same impulses as today. They have always produced monosyllables like big, dig, gig, bog, gag, smug, and lug, and most of them were “emotional,” that is, sound-imitative or sound symbolic. Hogs grunt. Is the word hog onomatopoeic? Do swine “say” hog-hog or pig-pig? Perhaps. In any case, their Dutch siblings “say” big-big!
Why then is the hedgehog called hedgehog? The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) explains: “So named from frequenting hedgerows and its pig-like snout.” I assume that the corresponding page in the OED online has not yet been edited, because the same formulation appears there. Or perhaps there is nothing to edit in this statement. Perhaps. Hedgehogs may be attached to hedges, but it is amazing that such an inconspicuous feature was chosen for naming the familiar rodent. Isn’t our solution too good to be true?
Always know whom to marry. Image by markito from Pixabay. CC0.
Hedgehogs don’t live in America, and every time I discuss the Grimms’ tale “The Hare and the Hedgehog” with my students (I often teach German folklore), I have to describe the protagonist’s way of life. I also very much admire the end of the tale, the storyteller’s advice: “If you are a hedgehog, always marry a hedgehog.” I have seen many young people who disregarded this advice and paid dearly for it.
What are the most conspicuous features of the hedgehog? A hedgehog, if attacked, rolls itself into a prickly ball (what a wonderful way of hedging against enemies!), but other than that, it is easily domesticated and is great fun to have at home in summer except that you cannot pet a hedgehog. Also, like mongooses, hedgehogs attack and devour snakes.
In my opinion, the name hedgehog does not do justice to the creature’s behavior and shape. It is also unclear why English replaced the ancient word for “hedgehog” with a new (dialectal?) one. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian have retained the Indo-European name (such is German Igel; the Slavic name is also related to it). Be that as it may, since the hedgehog’s projecting mouth and nose do resemble a snout, prickly hog (this is what the creature is called in numerous Dutch dialects) would be a more accurate name than hedgehog.
Let us now leave hogs to their devices and look at the noun hedge. This word has a dramatic history. The Old English for hedge was hegg. I will not go into phonetic niceties and will only say that hegg is related to haga “enclosure, yard.” Hegge yielded hedge, and haga became haw, as in hawthorn, which is also familiar from the last name Hawthorn. Yet haga is also recognizable, because we know the place name The Hague, Den Haag (see is image in the header). The name of the capital of the Netherlands has retained its ancient form and even its definite article. Last week, we looked at burg and its likes, and I noted that town is akin to Icelandic tún “enclosure.” This is what town meant (consider Modern German Zaun “fence”), exactly like DenHaag.
The Hague: nor exactly an enclosure. The Hague. Photo by Zairon. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The most dramatic part in the history of the root we now see in hedge and haw concerns the Old English word hagosteald “bachelor; warrior.” Its counterparts elsewhere in Germanic displayed several meanings: “king,” “retainer,” “servant,” “peasant,” “widower”—a partly incompatible medley of senses. But only at first sight. Among other things, the original “enclosure” was the feudal lord’s residence. In those days and much later, the eldest son inherited his father’s property. His brothers, those who aspired to a career, had little choice and usually became soldiers, or, to use the feudal term, retainers (the same situation with the younger brothers continued into the nineteenth century). Those retainers were, of course, bachelors, and as far as language is concerned, the step from “bachelor,” to “widower” (a male without a wife) must have been short. In Modern German, Hagestolz (now obsolete or facetious) still means “bachelor”; stolz “proud” is a product of folk etymology.
Not yet a town. Photo by Semiautonomous. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
It is amazing how words change their meanings and attain secondary senses, which oust the original sense. From “king’s retainer” to “bachelor”! But incompatible senses also coexist in modern languages and give us no trouble. This, for example, happened to English bachelor. Its Old French source meant “young man aspiring to knighthood,” while Medieval Latinbaccalārius referred to a laborer on an estate (baccalāria “area of ploughland”). Though our BA’s don’t aspire to knighthood, getting a college degree is an important step to the proverbial room at the top. And we, the readers of this blog—well, we have made a long way from a piece of enclosed land to the heights of historical semantics. In our journey, we passed by hogs and hedgehogs, visited The Hague, and almost attained a BA. (Yet I keep wondering whether hedgehogs have anything to do with hedges.)
To Our Readers
My sincere thanks to the two readers who have researched some obscure words and asked me about their origin. My resources are good but limited. I have an excellent etymological database and a huge collection of books on word origins. If they provide me with no answers, I give up. This is especially true with regards to the non-Indo-European languages. Alas, all etymologists are in the same position. They know only what little they know.
From My Collection of Useless and Evil Proverbs
It is amazing how many proverbial phrases people have invented to demean women! Here is an Early English gem in its original spelling: “…by the common prouerbe, a woman will wepe for pitie to see a gosling goe barefoote.” John Heywood, a sixteenth-century playwright, is mainly remembered today for his collection of proverbs. He knew the saying quoted above, and it was familiar to English readers of Notes and Queries as late as 1891. Walter Scott seems to have made one of his characters use this saying in Rob Roy (so I have read but did not check). As usual, we have no information about the date and the author of this saying, but the ugly “sentiment” is familiar. The Russian saying “A woman’s tears are water” is still current. What a shame!
Featured image: Charlemagne at Court, illuminated manuscript. Public domain via Picryl.
Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis. This volume of nearly 400 pages has the subtitle: “The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.” Below, I will summarize my impressions of Fatsis’s book. Perhaps Unabridged in the title also refers to the volume’s scope, because it presents a broad picture of British and American lexicography for more than two centuries.
Fatsis has been a passionate word lover since early age, so his foray into the history and practice of dictionary making was not a whim. He approached his project in the best way possible: he got himself hired as a lexicographer-in-training, spent several years with Webster, wrote numerous definitions, spoke to dozens of specialists in the United States and at Oxford, and finally produced this book about dictionaries and dictionary making—not only about Webster’s Unabridged. Rarely does he say something that gives away his insufficient mastery of the subject. Thus, on p. 71, he calls Notes and Queries an obscure British journal. In fact, it was for years one of the most popular weeklies in the English-speaking world, and it still exists. The OED has always been fully aware of it. But this is just faultfinding. Fatsis did become an expert.
I am surprised that we never met. For years we attended the same biennial conferences of The Dictionary Society of North America, talked to and made friends with the same people, and listened to the same presentations. Better late than never. Now we’ll meet virtually in this blog. The book, which in addition to the indispensable introductory remarks, acknowledgments, endnotes (excellent endnotes), bibliography, and an index, contains thirteen chapters. Among other things, they are devoted to the history of Webster’s dictionary. Who were the two Merriam brothers? Their names are now indelibly tied to Noah Webster’s. We do know such hybrids, Schubert-Liszt and Verdi-Liszt, for example. What stands behind the symbiosis? In this case, the story is worth reading.
Two main questions about dictionaries recur again and again. How many words should be included? And how should they be defined? How, for example, do you define in, as, so, oh, weather, be, and thousands of others? And does anyone need such definitions? New words flood language (any language) at all times. When we study the past, we depend on written records, because only such as are extant. But even a dictionary of Old English, which deals with a closed corpus, is incredibly difficult to put together. Though a living language grows every minute, most of us need not worry about this circumstance. We know what we know, and if some word is new to us, we may either disregard it or look it up. But lexicographers have to anticipate everybody’s questions, and when we do look up a word (for its meaning, spelling, pronunciation, use, or origin), we expect it to be there. Hence this endless, self-defeating chase for the words coined the day before yesterday, yesterday, or five minutes ago. Hundreds of them are stillborn. For an online dictionary space is not a problem, but paper editions cannot be allowed to weigh a ton.
Fatsis believes that modern dictionaries should be all-inclusive: if a word exists or once had, in the poet’s words, its singing minute, get hold of it and rejoice. Also, volatile slang, obscenities, and ethnic slurs? Well, yes. This book is by far not the first one about dictionaries and their problems. Webster’s Third had the audacity to include the F-word and the seemingly innocuous ain’t (my spellchecker still underlines ain’t in red). Today the storm that followed the publication of that dictionary is hard to imagine. The unpronounceable F-word? My goodness! This is the most frequent word (plus its derivatives) hundreds of people use actively. Even our elected representatives constantly feel f-ed up by their f-in’ opponents and share their hurt feelings with the public. Why should dictionaries be guardians of good manners? Actually, they often (and nowadays, even regularly) do play this role, by explaining how certain words are used, where they may or should be avoided, and so forth.
What I missed in this book is a broad discussion of dictionary inclusion and culture. A great dictionary, a monument erected for all times, does feature all the words it can net, but this feast is partly wasted. The vocabulary of our young people is tragically small. Even the books by Mark Twain and Jack London (whom our American children and grandchildren seldom read, if at all), to say nothing of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackery, are full of words they don’t understand and don’t care to learn. Dictionaries are getting richer and richer, while individual vocabularies have dwindled like Balzac’s la peau duchagrin (my favorite phrase, which, much to my chagrin, no student I have met so far was able to understand).
More harping on the same note! Fatsis did not mention Spelling Bee, this institutionalized torture chamber, but devoted an enthusiastic chapter to the Word of the Year. What passions, what spirited discussions about a moth that will die an hour later! And all that from the people who call themselves linguists. That says something about the level of modern linguistics. Fatsis, as I said, takes the liveliest interest in such contests. He is a man of liberal views, investigates at great length the history of the adjective woke, likes the new use of pronouns, and many other things that are not to my taste. But I am a highbrow, while he would probably be proud to call himself a lowbrow (no offence meant, and I hope no offence taken). I would prefer chapters on pronunciation and etymology in dictionaries. Both subjects are barely mentioned in the book.
A page from Geographical Webster’s Home a. Dictionary. National Library of Poland. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Glossaries and dictionaries have existed for millennia, but the Internet and AI killed their print versions. Such is the way of all flesh. Though even today people sometimes ride horses in towns, usually they drive cars. The OED and Merriam Webster have survived so far by resorting to websites and ads of all kinds and thus attracting funding, but even they have gone online. All print editions have succumbed to the spirit of our virtual epoch. Do you still remember Funk andWagnalls, the glorious Random House, and the many editions of Heritage Dictionary? Gone, all gone, and with them hundreds of lexicographers were, to use the impolite British phrase, made redundant. In his recent interview with the PennsylvaniaGazette, Fatsis said (in connection with print books and newspapers): “The New York Times is thriving in part because of its growth of its games and recipes offerings.” Hear, hear!
My conclusion? A fine book. Read it from cover to cover. Some chapters are truly excellent, the best one being about the late collector Madeline Kripke. The last two chapters are also excellent. And here is the opening sentence of the Introduction: “I fell in love with the dictionaries on my eleventh birthday. My big present that day in 1974 was Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Second college edition, Deluxe Color edition), published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio).” Nothing is better than remaining true to one’s first love, especially when it is reciprocated.
Featured image: Image from page 450 of “The California horticulturalist and floral magazine” (1870). Public domain via The Internet Archive on Flickr.
My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.
Such a woman would never have touched a hamburger. Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield by Thomas Gainsborough. Public domain via Getty.
English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.
The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!
The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.
Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”
What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.
The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~ u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.
It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?
As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.
Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation. This is much different than the overly fussy stigmatizing of double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” or “Nobody didn’t see anything,” which are common, colloquial, and not at all confusing. No one takes “I didn’t see nothing” to mean “I saw something.”
Misnegation is a rather more complicated situation where a negation and a hidden negation conspire to trip up a writer, as in this example from a Hägar the Horrible comic strip (first noticed in a 2018 post by writer Stan Carey). Hägar says “This is the only time of year when I miss not having a nine-to-five job.” When his sidekick Lucky Eddie asks “Why?” Hägar says it’s because “I never get to go to an office Christmas party!” The word miss hides a negation and if you “miss not having a nine-to-five job,” you would be missing the absence of such a job. But what is meant here is that Hägar misses ever having a nine-to-fiver.
Misnegations happen in speech quite frequently, but unless they are in print or online, we may overlook them. The term seems to have first cropped up in 2004, on the Language Log blog in a series of posts by the linguist Mark Liberman and others. Two of the most common types of misnegations involve expressions of the form:
no NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB
and
it is IMPOSSIBLE to UNDERESTIMATE X
The first type is found in examples like “no detail is too small to ignore,” where the intended meaning is “all details matter, regardless of how small,” or “no detail is too small to matter.” With the misnegation, it actually reads as if details are routinely ignored and none are too small to receive that treatment. Liberman offers some true-life examples:
No one is too young to avoid being tempted.
No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service, or invention.
Kelly… said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore.
No error is too small to ignore—I want to make the second edition perfect!
If these make your head hurt, just wait.
The second type of misnegation is found in examples like “It is impossible to underestimate Springsteen’s influence,” and many similar examples. If “overestimate” means to attribute too high a value and “underestimate” means to attribute too low a value, then one is saying “It is impossible to attribute too low a value to Springsteen’s influence,” which is presumably not what is meant, unless it is a backhanded compliment.
Here are some more real examples:
The challenge of creating weekly scripts that move seamlessly among six clearly defined principal characters cannot be underestimated. (Liberman found this one in TheNew York Times, 2004)
All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. (from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, noted in Stan Carey’s post)
Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated. (from Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, also noted by Carey)
There are other types of misnegation as well. Ben Zimmer points out some examples of overnegation that arise from one too many nots: It’s HARD NOT TO X AND NOT Y.
It’s hard not to walk into a press conference these days and not hear, at some point, “With scholarships where they are today…” (The Michigan Daily)
But it’s hard not to read Olney’s book and not appreciate the key members of the team that dominated baseball for half a decade. (Deseret News)
[In researching the period] it’s hard not to look at 1910 and not see what’s coming down the road. (Provincetown Banner)
The first not in each example means that one is not doing the walking, reading, or looking. But if you are not doing those things how can you then not hear, not appreciate, or not see what’s coming. The first not in each example is causing the problem and needs to go. And Zimmer points that that you also get misnegation with the variant “It’s hard not to do X without doing Y” as in “It’s hard not to think of the art of New Mexico without thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe” (his example from the Tucson Weekly).
And then there’s the phrasing “fail to miss,” where there is a pair of negative verbs and no not, and the expression is used to mean “fail to see.” That one was made famous by sportscaster Dizzy Dean, who told fans “don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”
For writers and editors, it’s important to be aware of the possibility of misnegation or overnegation. Editing and style guides don’t tell you to put things in the affirmative for nothing.
.jpg){kind=link}
