"How I met my wife," is a fiendishly clever essay by Jack Winter, that appeared in a July 1994 edition of the New Yorker.
It begins thus:
"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate."
Reads funny, doesn't it? Look the sentence over again, and see if you can figure out what's wrong with it.
Yes, Winter illustrates our pervasive use of negativity in language -- by avoiding negatives (more precisely, he packs the essay full of expressions that we normally recognise in their negative form, but rarely if ever see in the positive).
The results are bizarre and amusing.
Joshua Carmody says the essay “makes fun of one of the oddities of the English language.” I don't agree that the oddity is exclusive to English. For example, the French language is similarly rich with negative expressions, n'est-ce pas?
Comments
2 comments
I am not discordant with your point. We should disavow negativity should we not?
I don't want to sound dishonest Sandra -- the truth is, I don't know nothing.