Self-negation

“I think we cannot underscore the threat …”

Self-negation

I heard this a week ago on CNN.

Problem:
The speaker said the opposite of what she meant.

Explanation:
U.S. Secretary of State Clinton said on April 22, 2009, “I think we cannot underscore the threat …” in a presentation to the U.S. Congress, and the CNN television network broadcast it on April 23.

I do not recall the end of the statement, but I do remember that Secretary Clinton did not include the word “enough” in her statement.

If I recall correctly, the “threat” referred to the threat of the Taliban taking control of Pakistan’s nuclear arms.

Secretary Clinton was trying to say that she could not overemphasize the threat.

The verb “underscore” in this context simply means underline or pay attention to, not overemphasize.

The solution comes from including the adverb “enough” or the adverb “sufficiently” in the statement.

The Secretary’s misstatement is equivalent to someone saying “I could care less.” when he or she should say instead “I could not care less.”

Solution:
“I think we cannot underscore enough the threat …”

“Original Copy”

Self-negation

I saw “ORIGINAL COPY” misspelled in a YouTube video yesterday while writing my blog post about Engrish.com.

The phrase went right past me when I first saw it yesterday — probably because it is so common, especially in American English.

But reading the phrase a second time made me think, “Huh?!”

How can something be original and a copy at the same time?

It cannot, so this phrase is a self-negation.

For fun, I searched Google for “original copy” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 1,100,000 matches.

Yikes!

A “quantum leap” is NOT impressive.

Euphemisms, Nouns, Self-negation

Have you ever heard someone say something similar to “The company made a quantum leap in productivity this past quarter.”, as if trying to say that a lot of progress was made?

I do not know the origin of the phrase “quantum leap”, but you should know that this euphemism, which is especially popular in American business, is essentially a self-negation.

The classic definition of the noun “quantum” is the smallest quantity of radiant energy that can exist independently.

A “quantum” in physics is the energy that is equal to the frequency of the associated radiation times Planck’s constant.

And a “quantum leap” refers to the discontinuous, instantaneous jump of an electron in an atom from one quantum state to another.

So taking a “quantum leap” truly refers to taking the smallest leap possible — not exactly what most Americans mean when they say it.

I suspect that many people misapply the phrase “quantum leap” so that they can sound smarter.

But they end up sounding a bit ignorant or pompous to anyone who has been exposed to even a little bit of modern physics.