China has long been considered the workshop of the world, providing low cost goods at minimal cost. Mainframe Computing may be a topic on which you think you have little or no experience, but the reality could not be further from the truth. Holosko and Marin D. Feit, Health and Poverty :.
In the popular press and public rhetoric of the United States, one of the most striking views of the Canadian health care system is that it represents "socialized medicine. The reality could not be further from the truth. Many people credit the Clinton administration with creating a fantastically strong economy, as well as handing that economy to the Bush administration. For some reason, people seem to think that jackpots at an online gambling site won't be very good.
They think that for real money, you need to gamble at a casino in Vegas, Atlantic City, or Monte Carlo. However, the facts couldn't be further from the truth. While most doctors are perceived to be experts in nutrition, the reality cannot be further from the truth. The polemics surrounding the lead up to Doha have sometimes portrayed the developing countries as being intransigent. The truth could not be farther from reality. Developing countries are keen to make Doha a success.
In other cases discussed there, it seems that people have been off by one in deploying negatives, or have gotten a sign flipped and used a word in place of its opposite.
But none of those explanations will help here. In this case, perhaps some people have registered "could not be further from the truth" as a fixed expression, meaning something like "show s that this idea is completely wrong". Or perhaps people are substituting "the reality" for "this claim" or "this belief". Perhaps an enterprising semanticist will be able to explain that this error tells us something about the logic of space and its metaphorical application to degrees of truth.
Somehow, the two were mixed up into a self-contradiction: "but the reality couldn't be further from the truth". I find the example interesting because it's not immediately obvious that it is a slip. And unlike optical illusions, they also tell us something about the process of sentence creation. On the contrary, it seems to me to be a necessary truth, since reality must by definition coincide exactly with truth or must at least be a proper sub-set of it, depending on your ontology, and assuming de re interpretations throughout , and therefore it's not possible for reality to be any further from the truth than it actually is, which is not at all.
April 20, am. Maybe people are thinking of two different ways of expressing what they mean — something like "the truth could not be further from this claim" and "this claim could not be further from reality" — and splice them together somehow. This may have begun with people truncating the phrase "your perception of reality couldn't be further from the truth" because for whatever reason they can't or don't want to ascribe the mis-perception to a particular party.
FWIW I'd be inclined to favor a 'fixed expression' hypothesis over a 'blend' hypothesis. And to push this idea a little further, it occurs to me that 'couldn't be further from the truth' contains a strong element of absolute contrast, so maybe instead of Mark's suggestion of 'this idea is completely wrong', a closer paraphrase might be 'the opposite is true'.
Massage the syntax slightly, eg by inserting 'is', or replacing 'the reality' with 'in reality', and I think you get something very close to the intended meaning —. I'm also curious: what sort of experimental design would allow the 'fixed expression' vs 'blend' explanations to be tested empirically?
Perhaps 'couldn't be further from the truth' is simply being confounded with 'couldn't be more different'. I believe it's a muddling of the phrase "in reality, this could not be further from the truth," or "the reality is, this could not be further from the truth. Presumably they meant "the report's author" but I wonder if most people's eyeballs slid over that to deploy a Thog ism as they slide over terms like "The reality could not be further from the truth", deducing what was meant despite the fact that what was actually down in black on white was different.
My guess is that what the phrase means is something like "the reality could not be further from the ideal," with "the truth" meaning "that which ought to be true given what has been previously supposed.
Language log constantly picks up on these types of things that we usually happily process and understand without noticing the "fault". Yet an insistence on flawless logic in language is one of the supposed sins, is it not? If I am correct and this construction is easily understood, more easily understood than analysed, where's the problem? Where's the "slip"? We're not picking out problems or pointing out sins, we're observing and analyzing usage.
Patterns of usage that raise questions about the nature of language production and perception are especially interesting. We're not censorious, we're curious. I find it fascinating that an expression that is so clearly self-contradictory, and thus meaningless, on it's own, can so clearly express the intended meaning in context. I can see how an editor could easily miss it. Misterfricative, even if it is used as a fixed expression like "couldn't care less" , still, that doesn't explain where it comes from.
Fixed expressions start somewhere. But normally, a "fixed expression" continues to have its literal meaning, merely getting used more often than the chance combination of its syntactic and semantic parts would predict. So even if semantic-mutation-of-a-fixed-expression is the right theory, I agree that there's a puzzle about why this one mutated, and why its mutation is so easy to fail to miss. I couldn't fail to disagree with you less. Safire, who generally could not be further from linguistic reality, once in characterized such expressions as portmanteau phrases with the index phrase "Perish forbid!
There should exist the complementary phrase "Heaven the thought! I have an entirely different theory: that for these people truth simply means 'claim', neither more nor less.
They have listened to too many people saying The truth is … when all that was meant was We claim that …. I agree with Ellen. What's interesting about this turn of phrase involves both the mutation from the "standard" expression and why it's used here but not there—but from a nerdy point of view, I can imagine nearly half a dozen ways it could have arisen initially, and half a dozen more reasons it might have been attractive to people who subsequently heard it used, and so on and so on and so on.
We might list all these possibilities and still miss the one that explains where Yu Guo saw the expression, I think. Also, the more we find plausible explanations, the more people might come to think these are justifications for why the expression is correct in this context. The expression, however, that I found most interesting was the first: "in the best of all worlds for X theory," followed by a straightforward description of the theory.
And surely "seen to be" should be "seen as"? Though, "seen as" implies they are not really, where "seen to be" accepts that they are.
I'm slightly confused by the use of penumbra here where I would have expected plethora or something similar. Assuming penumbra is intentional, is it meant to convey that the variants cluster amorphously around the primary example, like a shadow?
Or something else? Did anyone else have to read and re-read the headline a few times to realize what was wrong with it? I did. FTR, I did it after reading the first sentence of the article, before having read the rest. It seems so obvious in retrospect. And reading texts critically is part of what I do every day.
You'd think I'd see immediately what was wrong at least once it had been brought to my attention that something was wrong with it. April 20, pm. Isn't there any possiblity that the "reality" is a misuse or a tweak of "realization" in the sense of conceiving or being aware? Oh, Marie already commented this sort.
Differentiation: Hers didn't mention the possibility of misuse or tweak. Mark L, re: "We're not picking out problems or pointing out sins, we're observing and analyzing usage. Not to put words in joseph's mouth, but it seems like viewing this as raising questions about production and perception does reveal a certain viewpoint.
Why, after all, does it not raise questions about the literal meanings of the words and combinatory rules that license the phrase in question, or even about the utility of such a notion i. Please help! No, it means that it is a long way from the truth.
In fact, it's as far from the truth as it's possible to get. Click to expand Otherwise, it could conceivably be further. Yes I understood it now! Thanks a lot to both of you! Hermione Golightly Senior Member London.
You said mean the basic grammar says that it can't be further from the truth means it is near to the truth. I think the confusion was with the word "can't" and with the similarity to this phrase: What you said can't be far from the truth.
I know what you're thinking, but you couldn't be further from the truth. But if you think I've spent all my recent downtime reflecting on who I am and what I've done in those same five years, let me assure you, that couldn't be further from the truth. Couldn't be further from the truth. But that couldn't be further from the truth. It couldn't be further from the truth.
Which absolutely couldn't be further from the truth. This couldn't be further from the truth. Suggest an example. They think that I'm self-centered, that I take things for granted, but that couldn't be any further from the truth.
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