... Not!
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... Not!is agrammatical constructionin theEnglish languageused as afunction wordto make negative a group of words or a word.[1]It became asardoniccatchphrasein North America and elsewhere in the 1990s. Adeclarative statementis made, followed by a pause, and then an emphatic "not!" adverb is postfixed. The result is a surprisenegationof the original declarative statement.
According to the above, the phrase, "He is a nice guy... not!" issynonymousto "He is not a nice guy". Whereas the latter structure is a neutral observation, the former expresses rather an annoyance, and is most often used jocularly.
One of the earliest uses was in thePrinceton Tiger(March 30, 1893) 103: "An Historical Parallel-- Not." In 1905, it was used in the comic stripDream of the Rarebit FiendbyWinsor McCay.A 1918 instance was "I am darn sorry not to be able to help you out with the News Letter, but in me you have a fund of information—NOT."[2]
Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the[clarification needed]Saturday Night Livesketch and subsequent filmWayne's World,"not" was selected as the 1992Word of the Yearby theAmerican Dialect Society.
The "Not!" catchphrase was the basis of a scene in the 2006 filmBorat,in which a lecturer in humour attempted to explain the grammatical construction toBorat Sagdiyevwith limited success.
See also
[edit]- Privative,a particle that inverts the meaning of the word stem to which it is affixed.
Notes
[edit]- ^"Definition of NOT".
- ^Telluride (April 10, 1918)."Letter from W. D. Whitney, Yale Reserve Officers' Training Corps, New Haven, Conn., March 13, 1918"(PDF).Telluride News Letter.4(8): 12.RetrievedJune 27,2019.
External links
[edit]- Postfix Not! in English
- "1992 Words of the Year".American Dialect Society. January 13, 1993. Archived fromthe originalon June 15, 2006.
- Jesse T. Sheidlower; Jonathan E. Lighter (Summer 1993). "A Recent Coinage (Not!)".American Speech.68(2): 213–218.doi:10.2307/455678.JSTOR455678.
- Safire, William(March 8, 1992)."On Language; Not!".The New York Times Magazine.p. 20.
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