Grammar Question: Is or Isn't?

December 8, 2007 6:24 PM

Grammar Question: Is or Isn't?

I tend to say things like "Ice is cold and so isn't snow," (or less obvious things) with the positive/negative construction, which sounds correct to me. I also hear "Ice is cold and so is snow," the positive/positive construction, which I know is correct but is not usually the way I express things. My girlfriend laughs at my positive/negative and says that I wrong. Am I grammatically confused?

Are both constructions correct grammar? Is one more or less correct than the other and if so why? Thanks.

posted by philmas to writing & language (57 comments total)

Ice is cold and so is snow.

Ice isn't hot and neither is snow.
posted by flabdablet at 6:26 PM on December 8, 2007

I have never heard anyone make a statement with the postivie/negative construction you've used before. As far as I'm aware in comparisons your verbs are supposed to agree.
posted by shmegegge at 6:27 PM on December 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

It's grammatically correct, assuming that you're trying to say that snow isn't cold.

Actually, it's grammatically correct even if you mean snow is cold, it's just not factually correct.

Either way, your girlfriend is correct when she laughs at you.
posted by Jairus at 6:27 PM on December 8, 2007 [3 favorites]

Sorry. If you're trying to compare them, she's right. 'Isn't' is a contraction of 'is not', and "Ice is cold and so is not snow" doesn't make sense.

Unless you're trying to differentiate between two things: "Ice is cold and so isn't fire", ie. ice is cold, and therefore is not the same as fire.

But yeah, if you're trying to say they're similar, then your positive/negative just doesn't make sense.
posted by twirlypen at 6:29 PM on December 8, 2007

to hear "Ice is cold and so isn't snow," i would assume you meant something along the lines of, "ice is cold; therefore, it is not snow." which doesn't really work. sorry.
posted by wreckingball at 6:30 PM on December 8, 2007

The only way I can parse your "pos/neg construction" to make it say what you mean (that both ice and snow are cold) would be to turn the negative part into a question that depends on / refers to the positive part. Something like "Ice is cold; and, so, isn't snow?"

As a straightforward declarative statement it doesn't seem right to me either.
posted by CKmtl at 6:30 PM on December 8, 2007

You are definitely grammatically confused. "Ice is cold and so isn't snow" makes absolutely no sense.
posted by dhammond at 6:33 PM on December 8, 2007

...but if you remove the "so" from the sentence, it's a lot better. You can't really use "so" when combining positives and negatives like that.
posted by dhammond at 6:35 PM on December 8, 2007

To my ear, "ice is cold and so is snow" is permissible in English, but "ice is cold and so isn't snow" is not. To my ear the difference is completely clear-cut; neither is at all a gray area. The only way you could say the latter is as a meta-linguistic joke.

In "ice is cold and so is snow", "so" is being used as a placeholder for the adjective -- it imports the word "cold" into the second half of the sentence, for use in connection with the second noun. You could sort of substitute the clunky phrase "also having this characteristic" for "so". Maybe this gives a sense of why "isn't" is wrong there?

All of these are impermissible:
ice is cold and so isn't snow (meaning: snow also is cold)
ice is cold and so isn't fire (meaning: fire is not cold)
ice isn't hot and so isn't snow (meaning: snow also is not hot)

The only permissible use of "so isn't" is to mean "therefore isn't":
ice is cold and so isn't useful if you want to warm something up
ice is cold and so isn't fire (meaning: we can deduce from the coldness of ice that ice isn't the same thing as fire)
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:37 PM on December 8, 2007

If you're using "so" as an intensifier, as in "The way I use words is so not correct", then perhaps "Ice is cold and so isn't snow" could be something you'd say after falling on your arse on a particularly hard piece of it.
posted by flabdablet at 6:42 PM on December 8, 2007

A better linguist than myself could totally tell us all what part of the country you're from based on that colloquialism. I bet your within a couple hundred miles of me...because I heard that ALL THE TIME growing up.
posted by TomMelee at 6:43 PM on December 8, 2007

Well, help us become better linguists, Tom — where'd you grow up?
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:48 PM on December 8, 2007

"Ice is cold and so is snow" means "ice is cold and snow is also cold." As opposed to what you're saying, which doesn't mean anything at all.
posted by DarlingBri at 7:00 PM on December 8, 2007

It sort of works if you extend it and turn it into a question, i.e. "Ice is cold, and so isn't snow cold too?" In other words, you're saying that snow is related to or is a kind of ice, and it therefore shares a property with ice. Is that what you're getting at?

But I agree with the others, and your girlfriend, that the way you've presented it sounds unusual.
posted by alms at 7:05 PM on December 8, 2007

Assuming that you're trying to say that both ice and snow are cold, this makes no grammatical sense. If you're using so to mean something like "thus," than it makes grammatical sense, but it's just unfortunately constructed as to easily cause confusion. Your girlfriend is correct, but I'd love to know where this construction is common.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 7:09 PM on December 8, 2007

I've never heard the conjunction "and" in a positive/negative comparison. Usually it would be "but," as in, "Ice is cold but snow isn't."
posted by christinetheslp at 7:11 PM on December 8, 2007

It's amazing how many different meanings that sentence can have based on punctuation. It all seems to stem from different meanings of "so."

Ice isn't snow because it's cold.
Ice is cold and ice is SO TOTALLY not snow.
Isn't snow cold, because ice is cold?
Ice is cold and snow isn't cold. (My initial interpretation, though grammatically incorrect).

If I were revising English, I'd replace "so" with several new words to remove the ambiguity. Then again, this is what makes a language rich and fun.
posted by lostburner at 7:19 PM on December 8, 2007

What? This is the first time I have ever heard an expression like that. Your way is grammatically incorrect, but perhaps it is a regional expression that makes sense to people in your neck o' the woods. There are countless grammatically incorrect idioms and expressions in every part of the world to which locals never give a second thought. So, on a purely literal level, your phrase is whack.
posted by HotPatatta at 7:22 PM on December 8, 2007

Wait. Are you trying to say that both snow and ice are cold, or that ice is cold and snow is not cold?

Either way, the sentence sounds entirely wrong to me. I'm sure the sentence is disallowed by the norms of most English-speaking communities, which is what most people mean by "English grammar". But, as TomMelee says, maybe it's some kind of regional dialect. In any case, the sentence is "correct" only to the extent that whoever you're speaking to will understand you without feeling weird. Most people will feel weird, so it's "grammatically incorrect".

That's the standard way that people understand "grammar", and that's probably what you wanted to know. But more interesting to me is whether it's grammatical in the technical sense -- that is, whether the sentence is legitimately ruled out by the linguistic syntax of English (if so, and if it is used in some dialect somewhere, then it operates idiomatically and not as a linguistic construction). It looks to me like it could plausibly be grammatically impermissible, but I don't know if it's grammatically or semantically or pragmatically deviant because I don't know the lexical properties of 'so' (and that's REALLY hard to search for on Google). And now I'm kind of interested. I hope a linguist can pop in and enlighten us. Do the following sound weird to you?

"Ice is cold so is not snow."

"Ice is cold and snow is not as well."

"Ice is cold and snow is not too."
posted by painquale at 7:30 PM on December 8, 2007

I agree with HotPatatta. What? What are you even trying to say? I'm laughing along with your girlfriend.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:51 PM on December 8, 2007

I've heard people use this "so isn't x" before. You happen to be in New England? Seems to be distinct to this region.

It's definitely not grammatically correct, but you're not the only one who says it that way.
posted by knave at 8:07 PM on December 8, 2007

It's incorrect.

One isn't more or less correct than the other, because what you are saying is completely incorrect.
posted by wfc123 at 8:09 PM on December 8, 2007

It's completely wrong grammatically, but I like it.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 8:20 PM on December 8, 2007

The only way I can stretch my way into making your method work is if I say something like:

"Julie looks hot and doesn't Janie, too???"

But "Julie looks hot and so doesn't Janie" would not make sense at all.

Julie is hot, and so is Janie. Or, Julie isn't hot, and neither is Janie. "Isn't" means "is not." :) That's the reason why your construction is incorrect. "Ice is cold and so is not snow" just doesn't make sense, and I suspect it doesn't make sense to you if you say it that way, either.

I'd be interested in knowing where you're from, to see whether this is a micro-regional thing. (Ya know, the way they say, "the chair needs fixed" in Pittsburgh, which only makes sense to the rest of us because for some reason enough people say it that way that we've learned how to interpret it.)
posted by iguanapolitico at 8:25 PM on December 8, 2007

I've heard a nonstandard regional variation of "Ice isn't hot, and so isn't snow," but never the positive + negative.
posted by Jeanne at 9:04 PM on December 8, 2007

I was just thinking about this today, because my ungrammatical niece has a favorite comeback to any even slightly less than effusively positive comment: "So don't you!" It doesn't even have to follow a "You are X" type of comment.

In both your and her case I feel there is a less generic idiom that is influencing the construction, but I can't figure out what it is. I know that both are in use, that is they are idiomatic, rather than part of an idiolect (personal dialect), but neither are they particularly common enough in the way that e.g. "I could care less" has replaced "I couldn't care less".

The closest thing I can think of is "Well, aren't YOU the one" and similar.

I did google up an example of someone else apparently using yours: "Paris is full of crime and so isn't London."
posted by dhartung at 9:47 PM on December 8, 2007

Sorry philmas, I think you're wrong. If you're going for a positive/negative comparison, I would always recommend, "ice is snow but snow is hot." [Which isn't true, but anyway. Also, your girlfriend is not nearly as obsessive about grammar as I am. I wouldn't laugh; I would repeatedly correct you and never give up.]

Here are your options:

Ice is cold and snow isn't.
Ice is cold but snow isn't. or the above option.
Ice and snow are cold.
Neither snow nor ice are hot.

But never "ice is cold and so isn't snow." It just doesn't make sense. However... IANA English professor. I'm only an obsessive know-it-all who must be right at all costs.
posted by mitzyjalapeno at 10:22 PM on December 8, 2007

Wait, wait, wait... after reexamining the OP's "positive/negative", I think I know what he's trying to say. It's a bit more understandable with words that make factual sense, though... I'll replace "snow" with "fire" in my examples.

To me, it sounds like a nonstandard rearrangement of an acceptable sentence. Consider this statement:

"Ice is cold, and fire isn't so."

with "so" meaning "that way". As in, "That just isn't so!"

By rearranging the sentence with the "so" after the "and", it gains an unconventional lilt that I find oddly pleasing.

"Ice is cold, and so isn't fire."

It reminds me of passages in older poems where the author had to shift the syntax a bit to get the rhyme and rhythm to jibe. This poetic effect was intensified a bit in the OP's version, with "snow" rhyming with "so".

"Ice is cold, and so isn't snow."

It also sounds a bit like an old colloquialism. Reminds me of "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," for some reason.

I don't know if it's grammatically correct, but the obtuse nature of the phrase should discourage usage. If you feel you must say it, though, place particular emphasis on the "isn't", to distract people from the "so" and prevent them from interpreting it in the more common ways.

"Ice is cold, and so isn't snow."
posted by Rhaomi at 11:02 PM on December 8, 2007

Even if you put the emphasis on "isn't", the sentence still doesn't make any sense. The sentence makes more sense with a question mark on the end:

"Ice is cold, and so isn't snow?"

which could be interpreted to mean that "since ice is cold, isn't snow cold too?"
posted by pravit at 11:42 PM on December 8, 2007

Jeez, you guys. This is probably just a regional variant. There's really no need to say "it makes no sense", or to try to torture the interpretation to get it to make sense in your idiolect, or (especially) to laugh and point. Just say, "nope, doesn't sound right to me," and that's enough to tell the poster whether the usage is common or not. Keep this up and you're gonna make languagehat angry.
posted by painquale at 12:11 AM on December 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

Did you grow up in New England? I'm from New Hampshire, and I heard "so don't I" for "so do I" and "so didn't I" for "so did I" all the time when I was a kid. There's no logic in it, and I have no idea where the usage came from.

"I had fun today."
"So didn't I." (the person means that they *did* have fun.)

This was unexceptional usage in rural New Hampshire thirty or so years ago. I think it's not so common nowadays.
posted by Daily Alice at 4:26 AM on December 9, 2007

Like I said when I grew up I heard this all the time, I'm from w/i Appalachia. Where I'm from the OP's original statement means, translated "Ice is cold and so is snow" or "Ice is cold and snow is too", with I think the second one being a little more transliterally correct. Isn't indicates an agreement or a sharing of trait in this one, a little differently than "so is".

We heard "so isn't" a lot more with relationship to PEOPLE though. "He's my cousin and so isn't she." "She's my girlfriend and so isn't she." "I love Fords and so doesn't my cousin Larry." Like I said, the "xxx is xxx and xxx is too" is probably the most correct translation--literally a sharing of trait between two items a little differently than just saying "XX is xxx and so is xxx." I guess you could just say it seems...warmer, the expression I mean, not the ice.

There's a trick about grammar, and that's that there aren't REALLY rules when you're describing someone or someplace, and colloquial grammar, in my mind, makes a person more colorful and same/same w/ a story. Ever read Huck Finn? Roots?

All the time at work I adjust my conversation to who I'm talking to. I might use "You sho' took a shine to that there, dintcha?" and later in the day say "This piece was meticulously removed from a late 1800's farmhouse, you can see from the dimples present on the nails that they were hand forged."
posted by TomMelee at 5:44 AM on December 9, 2007

painquale is correct (and the rest of you are making me angry, grr!). The first on-point comment here was:

I bet your within a couple hundred miles of me...because I heard that ALL THE TIME growing up.

This construction is regional dialect, "ungrammatical" in standard/formal terms but perfectly grammatical in that dialect. Those of you who find it ridiculous do so for the exact same reason that someone who has never seen anything but standard Western clothing would find a kimono or a lavalava ridiculous. In other words, you're showing your parochialism. It's a big linguistic world out there!
posted by languagehat at 7:48 AM on December 9, 2007

It's a big linguistic world out there!

So it isn't!
posted by found missing at 8:32 AM on December 9, 2007

I think my kneejerk, "you're WRONG!" reaction was just because I have NEVER heard this before. Languagehat is of course correct that it is a big linguistic world out there, but with the power of modern media, the world is a much smaller place than it used to be. Sometimes we adults find ourselves surprised that we haven't heard it all, at least once. :) (I don't even remember that from Stephen King novels, where he puts in a lot of New Englandisms, but I haven't read him since I was a kid.) I think we really thought that this one individual was the only person to ever construct a sentence that way, and one person is just too small to make a region. We couldn't have it.

So anyway, I guess, philmus, go forth with your isn'ts. :) Let your girlfriend laugh. Then tickle her.
posted by iguanapolitico at 8:38 AM on December 9, 2007

I hate when people don't come back to answer the follow-up questions... Come back Phil!
posted by knave at 11:28 AM on December 9, 2007

Those of you who find it ridiculous do so for the exact same reason that someone who has never seen anything but standard Western clothing would find a kimono or a lavalava ridiculous. In other words, you're showing your parochialism.

Oh, c'mon, hat. Saying the exact opposite of what you mean is a little freakin weird. I know language has no logic and it is a wonderful party and we are all evil racists for disagreeing, but in this case, the constuction is weird and is going to make people who don't share your dialect laugh. That doesn't make the OP Wrong, but yeah, dude: weird.
posted by dame at 11:58 AM on December 9, 2007

Hey, lh's answer isn't bad. By that, of course, I mean that it is a good answer, since isn't == is, and bad == good.
posted by found missing at 12:04 PM on December 9, 2007

Found missing, for your example to be what we are discussing you would have to say the 'hat's answer isn't good. Or languagehat is good and so isn't his anwer.
posted by dame at 12:08 PM on December 9, 2007

I confused myself with my regional dialect.
posted by found missing at 12:09 PM on December 9, 2007

Instead of the prescriptivist approach of identifying whether a particular construction is "correct" or not, I prefer different criteria:

1. Clarity: Am I communicating what I want as clearly as possible?
2. Aesthetics: Is the way I'm expressing this sound weird/harsh/wrong?

These criteria are most useful in figuring out whether to reword something.

In your case, I am assuming that you intend to communicate that both snow and ice are cold. As you can see, plenty of people in this thread are confused because they're used to "isn't" as an opposite of "is", and so it looks like you're saying that snow is not cold. I was one of the people confused.

Because the construction can cause confusion, the better way to phrase it is probably "Ice is cold and so is snow." (Unless someone with your regional dialect would interperet that as you saying that snow is not cold. In this case, it's probably better to rephrase completely to something like "Ice and snow are both cold.")

That said, there are some contexts in which your is/isn't construciton is fine. If you're talking to someone you know uses the same regional dialect, then you know you can use it without confusion. If you care more about getting across your emotional state rather than facts about snow, then you may want to use the phrasing that comes most naturally to you.
posted by Asymptote at 12:35 PM on December 9, 2007

I guess I should also note that I don't find "Ice is cold and so isn't snow" to be an aesthetically pleasing way of saying that both ice and snow are cold, although this is my personal oppinion. I tend to like my sentences as logical as possible.

For example, a phrase I absolutely loathe is "same difference" when used in the comparison of two things. It's completely clear that the speaker "same thing", it just logically does not make sense. "Same difference" is a comparison of differences, not of things; and two identical things certainly do not have multiple differences between them to make a comparison of.

I'll stop ranting now.
posted by Asymptote at 12:42 PM on December 9, 2007

Er, it's completely clear that the speaker means "same thing".
posted by Asymptote at 12:43 PM on December 9, 2007

Ah, but each are different from other things in the same way. Same difference.
posted by found missing at 12:51 PM on December 9, 2007

I don't want to hijack the thread, but how do you get more than one difference out of that so that you can compare differences?
posted by Asymptote at 1:16 PM on December 9, 2007

Saying the exact opposite of what you mean is a little freakin weird.

So is wearing a lavalava, if you're not used to it. So is MetaFilter. So what?

Anyway, the point is he's not "saying the exact opposite of what he means," he's saying exactly what he means. In his dialect that involves an extra negative, just like French je ne sais pas. In your dialect it doesn't mean anything, but neither does je ne sais pas. Again, so what?
posted by languagehat at 1:17 PM on December 9, 2007

...how do you get more than one difference out of that so that you can compare differences?

If A and B are the same, then they both have similar differences with other things. The comparison is A's differences with C, compared with B's differences with C. Same difference.
posted by found missing at 1:27 PM on December 9, 2007

Dude, you know I love you, but no way. A lavalava does what Western clothes do: it covers (parts of) you. In this case "isn't" is doing the opposite of what "isn't" does in every other English dialect that I am aware of. That is weird. It is like wearing a hat and not clothes, not like wearing a kimono.

Just to be clear: Not wrong. However, given how the rest of English operates, weird.
posted by dame at 2:19 PM on December 9, 2007

(Sorry for the serial posting, but...) So what? So what is yeah, other people are going to think you are weird and laugh. That doesn't mean stop doing it, but it doesn't mean that every person it trips up is a small-minded jerkface either, as you implied.
posted by dame at 2:22 PM on December 9, 2007

That is weird.

Sure, if you're not used to it.

It is like wearing a hat and not clothes, not like wearing a kimono.

No it's not, unless you think the French go around wearing a hat and not clothes all the time.

So what is yeah, other people are going to think you are weird and laugh.

Sure, but I think that's apparent to the poster by now. Everybody else's job is to point and laugh; my job is to explain pedantically why it's all good.

it doesn't mean that every person it trips up is a small-minded jerkface either, as you implied.

I certainly didn't mean to; my apologies if it came across that way. Just trying to spread truth and light.
posted by languagehat at 3:46 PM on December 9, 2007

Truth is complicated, and so isn't light.
posted by flabdablet at 4:19 PM on December 9, 2007

Behind all the rhetoric, I'm pretty sure that everyone in this thread agrees with one another. It's all good, people!

"Ice is cold and so isn't snow" probably doesn't sound any weirder to the poster than "I could care less" sounds to the rest of us. Sure, it says "the exact opposite of what you mean" when considered compositionally, but none of us really notice.

On a side note, languagehat got me reading a bunch of JSTOR articles on the evolution of the double negation in French. Here's a pretty good Language Log entry on the topic. (It's also where I got the "I could care less" example from.) I'd really love to see a similar lingusitic and historical analysis of "so isn't snow." How'd that 'not' get in there? Why isn't it playing a compositional role in the semantics? What's the sentence tree look like? Etc.

/wannabe linguist
posted by painquale at 4:59 PM on December 9, 2007

I haven't found anything online about this particular phenomenon in Appalachian English. But I wonder... Southern Mountain Dialect often uses double negations to express a negation ("I ain't never seen him."). Maybe the "so isn't snow" phenomenon resulted from only one of the negatives getting dropped? The construction "ice isn't hot, but snow isn't neither" has one negative in the first conjunct and two in the second. Drop one of the negatives on each side and you get, "Ice is hot, and so isn't snow."

I loved all the colloquialisms in this article. "Thet pore boy's an awkward size - too big for a man and not big enough for a horse!"
posted by painquale at 5:21 PM on December 9, 2007

I know I'm late but I still cannot figure out what this means. Is this the sort of thing that might make more sense if one heard it? In my head, I cannot figure out what needs to be stressed in order to understand this phrase as it is intended. I am not laughing, I am completely puzzled. I love regional differences and that sort of thing, and I would like to understand how to read this.

languagehat and palinquale, I appreciate the lecture, but if either one of you could help me understand how the phrase means what it is supposed to (both ice and snow are cold, that's what I assume it means), I would appreciate that.

I understand phrases like "I could care less" because somehow the way that it is said makes the meaning clear. Although I don't say it myself.

Drop one of the negatives on each side and you get, "Ice is hot, and so isn't snow."

I can understand that though. I just cannot parse "Ice is cold, and so isn't snow".

Okay, I'm trying to figure this out.

"Danny is tall, and so isn't Paul."

"I need to work out and so don't you."

"Fudge is delicious and so isn't caramel"

"I am tired and so aren't you?"

Well, that last one makes sense to me. Being in the form of a question helps. Perhaps it's the same, just not in the form of a question, but understood the same way.
posted by Danila at 9:11 PM on December 9, 2007

Sheesh. Am I embarrassed. I'm in my early 50's, I've been speaking this way all my life. The weird thing is that no one else has ever questioned this construction that I use.

I'm trying to say that BOTH ice and snow ARE cold when I say "Ice is cold and so isn't snow, " and silly me, it always sounded correct even though it doesn't make any sense grammatically. I have never received so much feedback to a question on AskMefi.

As one or two folks guessed it probably is a colloquialism, in this case upstate NY, in the corner near Vermont and Quebec, about an hour south of Montreal. This manner of speaking was what I heard growing up.
posted by philmas at 5:03 AM on December 10, 2007

philmas: "I'm trying to say that BOTH ice and snow ARE cold when I say "Ice is cold and so isn't snow, " and silly me, it always sounded correct even though it doesn't make any sense grammatically."

Oh, well, in that case I guess it doesn't make sense. I think you threw everybody off in the OP by referring to your phrase as a "positive-negative" construction, implying that it means that ice IS cold (pos) and snow IS NOT cold (neg). But if it's really supposed to be a positive-positive, then I can't see a way to make it work beyond excusing it as a quirky colloquialism.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:25 PM on December 10, 2007

A few days late, but I wanted to interject that this is common in the Boston area, where I grew up, and it's always baffled me, too.
posted by lunasol at 5:48 AM on December 17, 2007