Who's the Troll?

[stoutfellow]

This is a horrifying story. The Miami New Times headlines it as "Sex offenders are ordered to sleep near a center for abused kids"; Michael Froomkin points out that "the government is requiring people — maybe people who are very not nice, but still people — to be homeless and to sleep under a bridge".

Comments

Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Not that I disagree with you that the "where to put post-prison sex-offenders" decision wasn't horrifying, but did you miss the part describing the one as sodimizing a child whilst holding a knife to his throat? Or the other man who repeatedly assaulted a little girl for years--?

"people who are not very nice"--?

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Mm. Since I used the words "points out", I guess I committed myself somewhat to Froomkin's statement, but I think I can safely disclaim responsibility for his parentheticals.

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way: Froomkin's words were "very not nice" - a rather different claim!

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Fair dinkum.

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Er. Not really.

"Very not nice" and "sodomizing a kid with while holding a knife to his throat" aren't even in the same universe.

I mean, yes, it's not quite as bogglingly barmy. But still...

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Point the first: my assertion was that "not very nice" and "very not nice" make sharply different claims. This is obvious on structural grounds: placing the negation within the scope of the intensifier makes it an intense negation.

Point the second: the formation "very not X" is a rare one in English - much rarer than "not very X". It almost always arises in contexts like:

Mike: Girls are not-stupid?
Manny: Some of them are very not-stupid.

(For Manny to say "not very stupid" would have been to make a very different claim.) It is even more unusual, therefore, to do what Froomkin has done, using it without the prior straight line. I am therefore inclined to unpack his statement something like this:

"The government is doing bad things to these people. It may be objected that these are not nice people, and this is true. They are very not nice. Nevertheless..."

I see nothing wrong with this formulation. Neither this formulation, nor my acceptance of it, implies anything whatsoever about his or my opinion concerning child-abusing psychopaths.

What's the old adage? If there's a reasonable way to interpret a seemingly strange statement, then, in charity, that is the interpretation we ought to lay on it.

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

Point the first: my assertion was that "not very nice" and "very not nice" make sharply different claims. This is obvious on structural grounds: placing the negation within the scope of the intensifier makes it an intense negation.

Actually, it wasn't obvious. Or at any rate not to me. Thank you for pointing that out. I simply didn't read it that way--or imagined reading it that way. It still reads to me as something light-hearted or snarky... but I'll have to pay attention for other uses if/when I run across them.

I was using the model "if one runs across a seemingly strange statement, for which there seems to be no possible charitable interpretation, find out what's really going on. (You might be missing something, the other person might've slipped up, etc.)

"The government is doing bad things to these people. It may be objected that these are not nice people, and this is true. They are very not nice. Nevertheless..."

No matter how you parse it though, the phrasing for the individuals (assuming the description of their crimes was accurate, rather than sensationalised) need to run: The government is doing bad things to these people. It may be objected that these people are among the vilest that walk the earth, and this is probably true, Nevertheless...

Anything lighter is... problematic.

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Eh, I'm a mathematician; we use the word "obvious" in, um, nonobvious ways.

There's an apocryphal story - the lack of a name is indicative - concerning a certain professor who, in the midst of a lecture, said, "It is obvious that [something-or-other]." He then paused and muttered, "Is it obvious?" He stood, tapping his foot and staring at the board, for a couple of minutes, then shook his head and wandered out of the room. The students, startled by this, looked at each other. Should we leave? After another couple of minutes, the professor wandered back in and said, "Yes, it's obvious," and resumed the lecture.

Re: Anglo-Saxon Understatement, Much--?

[carbonelle.livejournal.com]

That's a good story.

What does "obvious" mean in math terms?