Litote Understatements

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Bendell from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, John.

Hi, John. How are you doing?

Real good. How are you?

Excellent. Thank you.

Doing well. What’s happening in Circle City?

Well, I had a question. I had recently read something, and it just brought back to my memory of a client of mine years ago when I was working as a designer, interior designer in Cincinnati, Ohio.

And at that time, the client made a comment. I was more or less a purchasing agent for her. She had her own ideas about design, and she would tell me what she was after.

And after working with her for so long, I got a sense of what she liked, what she didn’t like, and I would show her things.

And she made – if there was something that she hadn’t even quite considered, her response would be, oh, I don’t not like that.

And to me, it was a double negative. And then recently I was reading an email that I got from a, had an attachment story to it from when I was still in Cincinnati and I was on a preservation, on a board of directors with the Preservation Association.

And they were doing a story about their home tour. And in the linked article in print, the homeowner was responding to one of the spaces that they had redone in this house that they renovated.

And her comment was, you can’t not like being out here. And again, it was the double negative.

And that’s when it just brought it all back to me. And I thought, what is it? I’ve been other places, lived other places. I’m not that far from there, but I had never heard it used like that.

Interesting. People that I thought might know better, and maybe it is a regional thing.

It’s not regional, just to get that out of the way. There’s nothing regional. It’s a construction in English where you want to express a positive through understatement, like totes is the term for it. And so the double negatives here actually are kind of expressing a positive.

It’s interesting, when you said the words of your clients, you didn’t really emphasize the not, which I would do. I don’t not like that, would be the way that I would say it.

Yeah, I was curious what exactly she meant.

Well, that was it. And again, it was after having that working relationship with her that I came to realize that she probably was not considering that absolutely.

But what I showed her was a different alternative, and it probably gave her a different direction to go in. Something that she was not even considering, but all of a sudden.

And it was always prefaced with, oh, sort of a surprise response, and that she was probably even surprised of it herself. And then that was how she verbalized it.

I don’t not like that.

So it’s expressing a kind of just a little bit more positive than neutral affirmation of what you’ve done without going overboard.

She’s not saying, I love it. She’s just saying. She’s just saying, OK, my first response isn’t negative.

Yeah, that sounds different from the second one.

Yeah, the second one is different. You can’t not like this place.

Yeah, it’s impossible for you to dislike it. That sounds different.

But it’s still those two negatives in a row. And so in most cases in English, when we have double negatives, the double negatives actually aren’t a positive. They don’t express. They’re just more negative.

Correct.

And this is one of the few places in English where you do see two negatives in a row expressing something that’s a little more positive than negative.

But I don’t feel like this is hugely positive.

No, no, I don’t either.

But the word you want, if you want to Google this, is L-I-T-O-T-E-S. That’s a rhetorical device where you express something through understatement.

Yeah.

Some people say lightetes. Some people say lightotes.

There we go.

Okay. I’ll look into that.

Yeah.

There you go.

Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

All right.

Take care.

Bye now.

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