George Lakoff once wrote: "When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don't think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I've never found a student who is able to do this."
By the way, I do not know why, but this exercise is always proposed, even by the most famous trainers, always with an elephant, sometimes pink (even in pranks!), sometimes in pijamas but always an elephant. ;-)
I'd rather prefer that you try to forget in vain the number
(Two hundred thirty seven)
The red room in The Shining. :-[
The famous barber's paradox by Bertrand Russel works thanks to grammatical negation: In a village there is only one barber, a clean-shaven man who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves. The question is: who shaves the barber?
According to the statement above, the barber can either shave himself,
or go to the barber (which happens to be himself). However, neither of
these possibilities are valid: they both result in the barber shaving
himself, but he cannot do this because he shaves only those men "who do
not shave themselves".
Let's not focus now on the paradox, for the purpose of this post we cannot avoid to notice that if there were no negations in the language, the contradiction could have not even been created in the first place. :-)
Many writers had fun using negations and the ensuing paradoxes as Lewis Carrol in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There where Humpty Dumpty is wearing a cravat which he says was given to him as an "un-birthday present" by the White King and Queen.
Another version of the paradox that may be of interest to writers is the infinite library, the protagonist of the story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges, included in his collection of short stories Ficciones. In the narrative Borges conceives a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format. In this library there are also books never written about things you never thought about, or never existed, and includes even more paradoxically, also the catalog of all catalogs that don't list themselves. Trance guaranteed 8-\
Other writers have made use of the negation in the most dramatic way through the presupposition that always lies behind a negation: in order to deny something, that something must exist in the first place. And because of this mechanism of the brain a writer can let you think about anything imaginary because your mind will try to figure out what it has to negate before actually negating it. If I tell you not to think of a shark in a red tuxedo dancing while drinking a strawberry cocktail, you can not help but creating a picture of it, right? And by the way we also discovered that negations don't work only with elephants: amazing! :-).
In the next post we will see how writers have a great ability to use presuppositions. We have already met Niccolò Ammaniti in a previous post. The title of his novel “I'm not afraid” is a wonderful exemplification of the use of a negation and a presupposition to create very quickly a specific emotion, in this case fear. If I say that I'm not afraid it means that there is something that I could or should be afraid of. Otherwise I wouldn't say anything. Just reading the title changes our emotional state and put us in the right mood to read what will happen in the book. Immediately after the title Ammaniti quotes an epigraph by Jack London:
Do you see how with a title and a quote the author has already set a whole emotional tinge for his story even before he starts?
How much are we helping our children when we tell them: "Don't be afraid!", "Don't cheat" or combining negations and quotes: "Your father told you not to do this and not to do that"? Should we be surprised that many of them just do what they are not supposed to?
The great writer Ernest Hemingway realized the power of presuppositions that inevitably lie behind every negation and it demonstrated it with an example that gives us goosebumps.
In a 1992 letter to Canadian humorist John Robert Colombo, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recounts it thus: While lunching with friends at a restaurant (variously identified as Luchow's or The Algonquin), Hemingway bets the table ten dollars each that he can craft an entire story in six words. After the pot is assembled, Hemingway writes on a napkin the following words:
driadema@gmail.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
By the way, I do not know why, but this exercise is always proposed, even by the most famous trainers, always with an elephant, sometimes pink (even in pranks!), sometimes in pijamas but always an elephant. ;-)
I'd rather prefer that you try to forget in vain the number
237
(Two hundred thirty seven)
The red room in The Shining. :-[
 |
The famous barber's paradox by Bertrand Russel works thanks to grammatical negation: In a village there is only one barber, a clean-shaven man who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves. The question is: who shaves the barber?
 |
| Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Theatrical release poster
|
Let's not focus now on the paradox, for the purpose of this post we cannot avoid to notice that if there were no negations in the language, the contradiction could have not even been created in the first place. :-)
Many writers had fun using negations and the ensuing paradoxes as Lewis Carrol in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There where Humpty Dumpty is wearing a cravat which he says was given to him as an "un-birthday present" by the White King and Queen.
 |
| Borges at L'Hôtel, Paris, 1969 |
Other writers have made use of the negation in the most dramatic way through the presupposition that always lies behind a negation: in order to deny something, that something must exist in the first place. And because of this mechanism of the brain a writer can let you think about anything imaginary because your mind will try to figure out what it has to negate before actually negating it. If I tell you not to think of a shark in a red tuxedo dancing while drinking a strawberry cocktail, you can not help but creating a picture of it, right? And by the way we also discovered that negations don't work only with elephants: amazing! :-).
 |
Italian poster for Io non ho paura
|
“That much he knew. He had
fallen into darkness.
And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know".
Do you see how with a title and a quote the author has already set a whole emotional tinge for his story even before he starts?
How much are we helping our children when we tell them: "Don't be afraid!", "Don't cheat" or combining negations and quotes: "Your father told you not to do this and not to do that"? Should we be surprised that many of them just do what they are not supposed to?
 |
| Hemingway in 1950 |
In a 1992 letter to Canadian humorist John Robert Colombo, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recounts it thus: While lunching with friends at a restaurant (variously identified as Luchow's or The Algonquin), Hemingway bets the table ten dollars each that he can craft an entire story in six words. After the pot is assembled, Hemingway writes on a napkin the following words:
driadema@gmail.com
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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