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Love the show, I've been listening to the podcast for a couple of months now.
I'm trying to figure out if there are other words which are only referred to with “not.†I've never heard any reference to an actual Panacea. (Except for the Greek goddess.)
A similar reference is to “politically correct.†It is almost always used with “not.â€
Is this a category of two? Are there any others? Is there a name for such words?
I have heard of aspirin described as a panacea at the time of its discovery. Likewise for penicillin.
I have used "not cheap" to mean "expensive". On one vacation, after I apparently said "Oh, that's not cheap" once too often, my five-year-old son asked if we could buy something that's not cheap.
Barely on topic: There are a lot of words for which only the negative is commonly used: debunk, immaculate, nonchalant, etc. Jack Winter gathered a large collection of them and used them in an essay titled, "How I Met My Wife", which you can find here:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-met-my-wife.html
My own notion on why some words are used mostly (though not invariably) with "not" is a sort of sarcasm, or reductio ad absurdam. Someone says that such-and-such is "not a panacea", and what they want to communicate is "it's not as beneficial as you want to make out"; in order to argue that they overstate your enthusiasm the more easily to debunk it. The message is "you're trying to tell us this is the be-all and end-all of the[insert industry here], but it isn't".
Maybe I'm being overly cynical.
Saying "not cheap" to mean "expensive", I think, is a different situation, more like a sort of reverse litotes. Litotes (which I imagine should be pronounced "LYE-toe-tease", but I don't think I've ever heard it said aloud) is for example saying "not half bad" or "not too shabby" to mean "pretty darned good". Heck, maybe it applies equally to both directions, so it's not reverse litotes after all.
I've never looked it up, but I have to believe it's of Greek origin, like "Archimedes", and thus singular. Let's see whether I can find out…Yep, one of my favorite sources, the Online Etymological Dictionary, says "rhetorical figure in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its opposite, from Gk. litotes, lit. 'plainness, simplicity', from litos 'smooth, plain, small, meager', from PIE root *(s)lei- 'slimy, sticky, slippery' (hence 'smooth'); see slime (n.)." In classical Greek the -ης ending does not indicate a plural noun.
Martha Barnette
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