Self-negation

“Create two process-improvement opportunities.”

Self-negation

I saw this in an email message about worthwhile monthly goals.

Problem:
This goal negates itself.

Explanation:
This monthly goal seems to be written well.

The goal has “Create” — a popular verb for goal setters because one can usually determine (“measure”) whether something has been created.

The goal has “opportunities” — a very popular noun in the corporate world because businesses thrive on taking advantage of opportunities, wherever they may arise.

And the goal refers to process improvement, and who couldn’t love process improvement, right?!

Take a few moments to analyze the goal, though, and you find that it negates itself.

What is a process-improvement opportunity? It is an opportunity for process improvement.

What is an opportunity for process improvement? It is a situation where something is running inefficiently. In other words, it is an inefficient process.

In other words, Create two inefficient processes. is the actual meaning of this monthly goal.

Ouch! Surely, this is the opposite of what was intended. A good business might want to identify inefficient processes, or it might want to create suggestions for process improvement, but a good business would not want to create inefficient processes.

I believe that the writer got carried away with assembling popular corporate buzz-words into something that looked like a worthwhile goal but actually would be bad for business.

Solutions:
“Identify two process-improvement opportunities.”
“Create two process-improvement suggestions.”

“She don’t love you no more.”

Common English Blunders, Contractions, Devolution toward Simpler, Foreign Languages, Pronouns, Self-negation

I heard this on a TV show.

Problems:
1. The verb doesn’t match the subject.
2. Double-negation nullifies the speaker’s intended message.

Explanation:
1. The pronoun “she” does not go with the verb “do”, even if the verb is in a contraction with “not”. The pronoun “she” requires “does” (or “doesn’t”), as in “She does …” (or “She doesn’t …”).
2. The “not” in the contraction combined later in the sentence with the “no” in “no more” leads to a sentence with a double-negative. Assuming that the speaker wanted to tell the listener that the third-party female (to which the pronoun “she” referred) no longer loved the listener, “no” should have been replaced with “any” in the sentence.

I believe that there are two forces that led to this double-trouble sentence.

The first force is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis: the single-syllable “don’t” is simpler to say than the double-syllable “doesn’t”.

The second force, I believe, is the influence on American English today of a relatively large population of native-Spanish speakers. If one uses a negative Spanish pronoun, adjective or adverb after a verb, the verb must be preceded by “no” (which means the same as “no” in English) or another negative pronoun or adjective.

For example, the pronoun “nada” in Spanish means nothing, and “encontró” means (he/she/it) found.

So to say “He found nothing.” in Spanish requires us to write “Él no encontró nada.” or more simply “No encontró nada.” — NOT “Encontró nada.” (or “Él encontró nada.”), which native-English speakers expect when first learning Spanish.

In other words, the above Spanish construction could be called a double-negative that is non-self-negating, and the construction is the correct way to write or say a such a negative in Spanish. In contrast and as far as I know, all double-negative constructions in English ARE self-negating.

As more native-Spanish speakers in the U.S. learn English, they will tend to use — mistakenly — (self-negating) double-negatives in English because (non-self-negating) double-negatives are a required part of their native language.

Solution:
“She doesn’t love you any more.”

“echo back”

Adverbs, Common English Blunders, Self-negation, Verbs

I heard this in a conference call.

Problem:
The adverb “back” in “echo back” is redundant.

Explanation:
The verb ” echo ” means to return a signal or message, so the meaning of “echo back” would be to return back [sic] a signal or message.

The “re” in “return” means back. Therefore, one could argue that something that “echoes back” would never reach the original sender.

Solution:
“echo”