Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 14:06:00 -0500

From: Larry Horn laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU

Subject: Re: ...NOT!



In connection with Barry's early ...NOT!--



This is from the Cincinnati Times-Star, 26 July 1888, pg. 2, col. 2:



Of course "White Wings" was mourned because he was hissed. Yes he

did--NOT!!!



--this example, antedating our earlier ...NOT/NITs (see esp. Sheidlower &

Lighter's excellent post-mortem in the Summer 1993 Am. Speech), is

consistent with my guess that the earlier examples of the retroactive

cancellation construction are spin-offs of this sort of syntactic blend,

where the ironic dissenter is simultaneously appearing to concede the point

("Yes, it is") while actually refuting it ("No, it is NOT!"). The "not"

may be whispered (as an ironic sotto voce to the audience, as Cary Grant

does it in "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House") or defiantly shouted to

the heavens (as evidently in the case above). The emergence of those

retro-NOTs that follow (and cancel) full sentences, rather than

sentence-final auxiliaries ("Yes, I have...NOT!"), is a partly distinct

phenomenon that seems to peak in cicada-like cycles, most memorably the one

that capped in time for the 1992 WOTY vote. I'm not entirely sure what the

ellipsis in the above example (Yes, he did(n't)--what? be mourned?), but

that's a query for the editor of the no doubt defunct Cincinnati

Times-Star, not for Barry.



Larry