Alan Ackerman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >OK, I give up. Why is "Warning: writing such code yourself is >non-trivial!" a litotes?
>I looked up "litotes" in Wikipedia at ><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes>. I can see how "not >non-trivial" would be a litotes, but why is "non-trivial"? Welcome back, Alan! The page says: " In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech in which the speaker either strengthens or weakens the emphasis of a claim by denying its opposite. The literal meaning of a litotes is "not X (but not necessarily Y)", and a litotes can be used as an understatement, actually meaning "very much Y," or to express ambivalence. " So, in this case, it's being used as understatement: "non-trivial" == "very much [Y]" where Y = opposite(trivial) = "complex". Now, if this were IBM-MAIN, we'd go off on a tangent about how English is a complex language and probably end up in some sort of ****ing contest, until the moderator there killed the thread ... ...phsiii
