Before going deeply into the pitfalls of excessive negation, though, let's first recognize its obviously useful aspects. This kind of negative communication obviously has short-term shock appeal, but too much of it can invite open resistance and hostility. In our writing as in our face-to-face interactions, excessive negation could create serious barriers to communication. It's clearly no accident that the English language has evolved so many ways of expressing negation positively. The wealth of words in English for affixal negation is, in fact, proof that over the centuries, native English speakers had gone to great semantic lengths to avoid using an outright "no" or "not" when expressing negation.

Source: Manila Times June 28, 2023 16:11 UTC