Grammar Girl here, you may have heard of a podcast that's been getting a lot of attention

lately, called Welcome to Night Vale.

Or maybe you're even a listener.

Well this week, guest writer Gretchen McCulloch of the All Things Linguistic Blog is going

to show us one of the interesting things Night Vale does with something called negation.

Normally, we expect a negative statement to mean the opposite of a positive one.

For example, Carlos is a scientist.

Means the opposite of Carlos isn't a scientist.

It's impossible for both of them to be true at the same time, unless we've sneakily

introduced to carloses or to meanings for scientists, in which case the one sentence isn't really

the negative equivalent of the other anyway.

Existing is the opposite of non-existing, A and not A are mutually exclusive.

Negation.

So far so good, but in the delightfully surreal podcast Welcome to Night Vale, the writers

do some cool things with negation that allow us to conclude a positive statement when

we hear someone saying a negative one using just a little bit of pragmatics.

Let's start with a fairly obvious example from episode 25.

Cecil the narrator says...

Oh, just one short year ago.

I had arranged a small ceremony to mark this occasion and invited Carlos to attend.

However, it looks like he will be delayed, but I am not worried.

I am not upset.

...