More on caring less about clichés, or not

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the nefarious phrase “could care less” (The popularity of “could care less” cannot be underestimated) saying it was not worth getting uptight about its use. I must have some very lenient readers because no one took umbrage at this thesis, which kind of made my exhortation at the end a little superfluous.

Here goes, anyway. There were (at least) three other silly clichéd phrases in that post that are prone to be incorrectly parsed. Let’s briefly uncover them:

• “Cannot be underestimated”. I’m surprised that no one complained at this one, especially as it’s in the title. It’s pretty much the same as the couldn’t care less/could care less switch. If I cannot underestimate something, it must be at zero, no? The better phrase would be cannot be overestimated, and it goes to the point I was making in the post: when we see several negative tokens in a row we don’t process them properly.
• “Cannot fail to miss”. Another one from the double negative stable. If you cannot fail, you must succeed. So, if you cannot fail to miss, you must succeed at missing; you must miss. A less awkward phrase would be you cannot miss and just leave the fail out altogether. Practically the only writer to get the distinction right was Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

  There is an art, [the Guide] says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [the Guide] suggests, and try it.

  The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

  That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

  Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

• “No one is too intelligent to avoid misinterpreting over-negated sentences”. This one just hurts my brain, it’s so packed with fruity negative goodness and, dare I say it, pomposity. Does it say what I was trying to convey? I give up: part of my brain parses it one way, and the other parses it another. I wanted to say “no one is so intelligent that they can avoid misinterpreting over-negated sentences”, but I don’t think the two are equivalent. I should just overwrite it with random 1s and 0s, throw it away, and rewrite it as “It’s easy to make mistakes when interpreting an over-negated sentence.” (Note the famous sentence “No head injury is too trivial to ignore” is of this type. Good luck with that one.)

All in all, I hope you fail to miss my general gist: for informal conversation and writing, all of this doesn’t really matter. Informality ensures impermanence. For formal writing, I’d say clarity and style above all. Avoid over-negated clichés like these.

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