Attention to Language
Oct. 29th, 2007 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiRhiannon Bury, "From a Room to a Cyberspace of One's Own: Technology and the Women-Only Heterotopia." In Feminist (Re)visions of the Subject, ed. Gail Currie and Celia Rothenberg. Lanham: Lexington, 2001. Page 58:
The more I thought about it, though, the more uncertain I became--my reasoning makes sense, but language doesn't always--and so in the spirit of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
languagelog I turn to Google psycholinguistics, which give me 1,610,000 hits for "can not only * but" and only 80,300 for "cannot only * but" which makes it one-twentieth as common, and which confirms that my instincts seem to reflect the majority usage. Which is a relief.
Women, however, have never simply accepted these normative discourses and, in response, enter or are placed in segregated sites in which they cannot only resist being categorized as "minus male," but take pleasure in identifying with the devalued "feminine."Out of charity to Bury, I'm assuming that she was the victim of an overzealous copyeditor here. If I squint, I can almost make it make sense by having it mean that women must do more than "only resist," but really the only way to make it completely comfortable is to break the "cannot" up into two words.
The more I thought about it, though, the more uncertain I became--my reasoning makes sense, but language doesn't always--and so in the spirit of
languagelog I turn to Google psycholinguistics, which give me 1,610,000 hits for "can not only * but" and only 80,300 for "cannot only * but" which makes it one-twentieth as common, and which confirms that my instincts seem to reflect the majority usage. Which is a relief.