I heard Andrew Ross Sorkin say "very, very not bad" on CNBC this morning and thought, he being a very smart financial columnist for the New York Times, that it was a cute, original, little smack at one of our reflexive understatements.
Then I found that it was not original, except by accident. Damien Burke, on Twitter in 2009 had said, "Well, I must say it was very not bad, very very not bad at all... " I know, there's no expression whatsoever that isn't on Twitter, but then I discovered that a car expert in an online forum in 2005 said, "How bad [is a double-clutch downshift on the track]? Very very not bad. Less bad than not doing it. That's code for good....” Apparently there was already an in-group taking its cute little collective smack at reflexive understatement.
Google shows me that in the last two years the expression is all over the place — in reviews of restaurants ("a little fancy for my taste, but the food is very very not bad"), TV programs (Christiane Amanpour, "very, very not bad"), books, and computer hardware, where it appeared first in 2001 and now appears more than anywhere else. (In the New York Times since 1851 it has appeared only once, in a hockey blog in 2009.)
Word people with a weakness for smacks at reflex usage can easily go overboard on one, even a little one, and I think maybe I was about to do that this morning. Imagine a technology that can work so quickly, almost at the speed of light, to keep them from doing that. Without Google I could have been asking for Sorkin's autograph.
No comments:
Post a Comment