Yeah, Yeah

You've heard the old joke about double negatives versus double affirmatives. But how about "No, totally"? Its structure suggests that you mean to affirm the negative to the strongest possible degree -- in fact, it means the exact opposite.

3 comments:

Tom said...

Interesting about nay and no; I didn't know that.

I wonder if the 'no, totally' phenomenon isn't related to 'no, really?' meaning,'I can't believe that. Is it really true?'

ColoComment said...

My dad used to have a joke: "Does a house burn up or burn down?"

I'm fond of the word "moot," which can mean either that something is debatable, or that something has been debated and is now settled. I found out that type of word is called an auto-antonym. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

MikeD said...

My wife thinks there's a contradiction in there when I say "Yeah... no." The yeah is actually short for "yeah, about that..." the "no" is the answer.

By why does flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?