... Not!

Grammatical construction in the English language December 2018 other uses of the word Not (disambiguation) January 2014 ... Not! is a grammatical construction in the English language used as a function word to make negative a group of words or a word.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/not Definition of NOT It became a sardonic catchphrase in North America and elsewhere in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause, and then an emphatic "not!" adverb is postfixed. The result is a surprise negation of the original declarative statement. According to the above, the phrase, "He is a nice guy... not!" is synonymous to "He is not a nice guy". Whereas the latter structure is a neutral observation, the former expresses rather an annoyance, and is most often used jocularly. One of the earliest uses was in the Princeton Tiger (March 30, 1893) 103: "An Historical Parallel-- Not." In 1905, it was used in the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay. A 1918 instance was "I am darn sorry not to be able to help you out with the News Letter, but in me you have a fund of information—NOT."Telluride 10 April 1918 Letter from W. D. Whitney, Yale Reserve Officers' Training Corps, New Haven, Conn., March 13, 1918. https://www.tellurideassociation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/04_8_1918_April.pdf Telluride News Letter 4 8 12 27 June 2019 Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the Saturday Night Live sketch and subsequent film Wayne's World,Jesse T. Sheidlower Jonathan E. Lighter A Recent Coinage (Not!) American Speech 68 2 Summer 1993 213–218 10.2307/455678 455678 "not" was selected as the 1992 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The "Not!" catchphrase was the basis of a scene in the 2006 film Borat, in which a lecturer in humour attempted to explain the grammatical construction to Borat Sagdiyev with limited success. See also Privative, a particle that inverts the meaning of the word stem to which it is affixed. Notes External links Postfix Not! in English January 13, 1993 http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/1992_words_of_the_year/ https://web.archive.org/web/20060615064316/http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/1992_words_of_the_year/ dead June 15, 2006 American Dialect Society 1992 Words of the Year https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/magazine/on-language-not.html On Language; Not! March 8, 1992 Safire William William Safire The New York Times Magazine 20 Category:1990s slang Category:English grammar Category:Saturday Night Live catchphrases Category:1890s quotations Category:1992 quotations Category:Quotations from television