So say “penultimate predecessor” …
“OPEC country” means something different than “OPEC.” But “ATM machine” is exactly congruent with “ATM.”
Double negatives in no way reverse the meaning in the kinds of constructions English peevers usually rail against, which are universally the intensified form of the negative in Black and poor White varieties of English. No intelligent speaker thinks “ain’t got none” implies the speaker does have some.
OK. But I don’t understand what point you’re making. The language is stuffed with these “redundancies.” PIN number. DC current. HIV virus. They all work in the same way and developed in the same fashion. All are in common use. They are all correct for every possible usage except the most formal writing. What are you trying to say about them?
There is an ambiguity.
Perhaps “the next most previous predecessor” to be clear that its talking about order AND someone different.
The idea that a double negative just becomes a positive arose from the strange notion that natural language, to-wit English, should be “logical”. In formal logic and algebra, a consecutive negatives do indeed cancel each other out. I learned the rule (as applied to English grammar), and its supposed rationale, in 8th grade, circa 1964. (One might suppose that English teachers of the time were watching too much Star Trek, except that this was before Star Trek.)
So why shouldn’t the same rule apply in all other languages, e.g., French? There, as I learned in 9th grade beginning French, a double negative is perfectly standard idiom.
BTW, the distinction between “grammatically correct” and “semantically meaningful” is made clear by the rather famous, and perfectly grammatical, textbook example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Frankly, I don’t think it’s Star Trek so much as simple class warfare (which isn’t called class warfare when it’s the rich putting down the poor, another linguistic oddity), in that the double negative is perfectly standard in the kinds of English usually associated with the poor as opposed to the middle class, such that the middle class could differentiate themselves by speaking “better”, as in “not like the poor”, and denigrate the lower-class language as illogical and ignorant in the process.
If logic were the arbiter of language, why is it “eleven” and not “one-teen” and “twelve” and not “two-teen”? Or, better, “onety, onety-one, onety-two, onety-three” etc. as opposed to special-casing one group of two-digit numbers. You can argue against that, but, logically, it follows the pattern established by literally every other grouping of two-digit numbers a lot better. (And, once again, French does number-naming a lot more illogically!)
And if it’s about improving the language, why not make a more substantive improvement by borrowing the aspect-marking features of AAVE, such as the difference between “He stay working.” and “He steady working.” It’s possible to express those concepts in Standard English, but they’re shorter in AAVE, and isn’t concision an absolute virtue, as per Strunk and/or White?
+1
Damn, you beat me to it! But only for one interpretation, of course.
Exactly. Gramatically, “previous predecessor” is an adjective modifying a noun, which is perfectly acceptable grammar.
Whether it conveys the intended meaning is another matter. If it’s referring to the predecessor, it’s at worst semantically incorrect and at best ambiguously redundant. If it’s referring to the predecessor before the most recent predecessor, well, it’s still ambiguous, since all previous holders are predecessors, not just the last one. If we’re discussing a number of predecessors, identifying a particular one, and are now referring to the one just prior, then it’s perfectly appropriate. It’s the kind of term I wouldn’t double-take reading in code comments, for example, where that kind of thing often comes up.
You cited “OPEC country” as an example of this grammatical but formally-incorrect redundancy. I just pointed out that it wasn’t.
No good. Consider, who is Barack Obama’s ultimate predecessor as President?
Untrue. “No, never” does not mean “yes” and no one would think it meant it was a sign of agreement.
Even “I an’t got no bananas” would never be interpreted to mean “I have bananas.”
Language is not mathematics.
OPEC is Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Country/Countries. As I said earlier, usage does not care about plurals. It is the same word.
“Is Polystan an OPEC country or a non-OPEC country?”
“Is Polystan an OPEC or a non-OPEC?”
Are these interchangible?
Why should they have to be?
Interchangeable is misspelled. This is as irrelevant as your question, but funnier.
That guy George.
Nice.
Redundancy: the act of using a word, phrase, etc., that repeats something else and is therefore unnecessary.
If the word “country” is redundant, as you claim, then its inclusion is unnecessary, its omission does not change the meaning of the phrase, and the two questions are interchangeable. Therefore, the word cannot be redundant unless the two questions are interchangeable, which they are not.
And just to be complete, there’s another interpretation of ‘previous predecessor’:
Say you have a sequence ABC, such that C’s predecessor is B.
Then you modify it to be AFC. C’s new predecessor is F. C’s previous predecessor is B.
That’s the interpretation I came up with when I first read the thread title, anyway.
