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Underestimated enough
Monday, May 28th, 2001 07:55 pmWell, here's a nice linguistic tidbit from the current UK election campaign:
"This cannot be underestimated enough."
How, one asks, might one underestimate something enough?
OK, this is what Chomskyans call a "performance error" (i.e. nothing to do with the speaker's internal knowledge of the language) so I'm not going to do one of those letters-to-the-editor tirades on the decline of the English language. It was a straightforward slip of the kind the speaker would never have made in writing unless he'd been typing very quickly (he's a Liberal Democrat - if he'd been from one of the other parties I might have had my doubts). What interests me is how the slip arose. Given that he was trying to say, in effect, "this is very important", I assume it was a conflation of "This cannot be overestimated", "This should not be underestimated" and "This cannot be [some adjective] enough."
"This cannot be underestimated enough."
How, one asks, might one underestimate something enough?
OK, this is what Chomskyans call a "performance error" (i.e. nothing to do with the speaker's internal knowledge of the language) so I'm not going to do one of those letters-to-the-editor tirades on the decline of the English language. It was a straightforward slip of the kind the speaker would never have made in writing unless he'd been typing very quickly (he's a Liberal Democrat - if he'd been from one of the other parties I might have had my doubts). What interests me is how the slip arose. Given that he was trying to say, in effect, "this is very important", I assume it was a conflation of "This cannot be overestimated", "This should not be underestimated" and "This cannot be [some adjective] enough."
