Geoffrey Pullum continues his assault on George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language”:
Orwell may have thought that phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption should be shunned because they needlessly and redundantly use double negation, but if so, he was wrong. Dropping the two negators from a not unjustifiable assumption yields a justifiable assumption; but that does not have anything like the same meaning. Calling an assumption justifiable suggests one can readily justify it; using “not unjustifiable” is much weaker, and merely suggests that you cannot rule out the possibility of its being justified.
In the same way, Jane is intelligent speaks positively of Jane’s intellect, placing her perhaps in the top quartile of the intelligence range. Jane is not unintelligent, by contrast, is faint praise indeed. It says she does not fall in the range picked out by unintelligent (say, roughly the bottom quartile), but it doesn’t say much more than that.
I take Pullum’s point, but there is a kind of weak ambivalence about the double-negative construction. Why not write that Jane is moderately intelligent. You can get nuance without the clumsiness of very English under-statement. He takes issue with this sentence in particular:
One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
Let me explain what is so astonishingly dishonest about that footnote. The adjective-negating prefix un- is fairly productive, but by no means universally so. For example, it doesn’t occur with the most basic adjectives of approbation and disapprobation (*ungood, *unbad, *unright, *unwrong). And relevantly here, it never occurs with color adjectives (*unred, *unorange, *unyellow, *ungreen, *unblue, *unindigo, *unviolet), and it never occurs with size adjectives (*unbig, *unlarge, *unhuge, *unvast, *unlittle, *unsmall, *untiny). What this means is that Orwell’s example has nothing to do with the not un- construction that he is supposed to be addressing.
It’s also obviously a little joke. But, hey, blaspheming is something Orwell believed in. So have at him.
The Dish 