Reverse English
A colleague recently told Roger Gould, a sociologist at the University
of Chicago, about a lecture, place uncertain, referring to double
negatives. Every language, the lecturer observed, has a construction
in which two negatives make a positive. But in English, he said,
there's no construction in which two positives make a negative.
From the hall came the perfect, anonymous response: "Yeah, right."
-- Jack Rosenthal, "On Language," The New York Times,
September 10, 1995
Paul Haahr