My original intention for this post was just to mention the Goog’s PR updates. I haven’t managed to recapture PR on my blogs, but VixenCrafts has hit a PR2 (yay!), and BandVox is holding steady at PR, um, 2. Despite my not posting on either for several months. And The Nicher is a PR2 as well, though I only started it a month or two ago, and only post when I want to talk about my affiliate marketing projects.

But then, I started thinking about naught. A lot of my British friends say “naught” where we would normally say “zero” or “nothing”. I was just thinking of how to word the post title, and “not naught” popped into my head. And then I realized- not is naught.

Ok, so it was just a theory. But I thought about it some more (I was in the shower, otherwise I’d have looked it up instead). Saying something is not something else, or that you’re not doing something is like saying you’re doing zero of whatever. Think of it this way. “I’m picking up zero clothes” is the same as “I’m not picking up any clothes”.

And then I got out of the shower and looked it up.

Can you believe that I was actually right? Etymology is a wonderful thing. I looked up etymonline and did a search for “not”. And up comes

not
negative particle,
c.1250, unstressed variant of noht, naht “in no way” (see naught). As an
interjection to negate what was said before or reveal it as sarcasm, it is first
attested 1900; popularized 1989 by “Wayne’s World” sketches on “Saturday Night
Live” TV show. To not know X from Y (one’s ass from one’s elbow, shit from
Shinola, etc.) was a construction first attested c.1930. Shinola was a brand of
shoe polish. Double negative construction not un- was derided by Orwell, but is
persistent and ancient in English, popular with Milton and the Anglo-Saxon
poets.

So there you go. The next time you’re searching for something clever for a character to say, or just an unusual way to say it- go ahead and bring your thesaurus. But check out a word’s origins too. You never know what you’ll come up with.

And by the way, don’t you just love how they use shinola as an example?

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