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Comment by shric | Hacker News Reader

> I guess it's more nuanced, but I don't have a PhD in economics like the author.

English is funny. I knew exactly what you meant and I'm not saying it's wrong, but it would be read completely the opposite if you had said:

I guess it's more nuanced but, like the author, I don't have an PhD in economics.

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Per the 'about' page, the author of the blog post does in fact have a PhD in economics.

I think shric was just remarking that English is funny because you can take the exact same words of a sentence and rearrange them a bit so it means the opposite.

Most sentences can be rearranged to mean the converse. This is cross-linguistically pretty common, depending on which atoms you choose to rearrange. Most sentences can be negated with at most a couple of word changes. This is cross-linguistically about as universal and anything in linguistics is, again depending on which atoms you choose as "words".

English isn't funny, humans are funny, building all sorts of redundancy into their languages, but then reversing polarity on a dime.

Not sure how you'd rearrange the same sentence in German to reach the negation without having to change cases and grammatical roles.

Komm, wir essen, Opa.

Komm, wir essen Opa.

Yes, that's why I said "I knew exactly what you meant and I'm not saying it's wrong"

> like the author, I don't have an PhD in economics.

Then you would say “unlike the author” - that’s what is confusing people.

Yes, that was my entire point.

Sounds like a characteristic of nearly any language with positional negation.

P => !Q

Can be rearranged to mean so many weird things.

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