Double negatives

It's day 28. Four weeks this evening.

It's 2004. I hate phones. But instant messaging is kinda nice. In our 'getting to know each other' phase, Hillary and I spent dozens of hours messaging each other, often deep into the evening.

Apologies for not doing this justice, but I don't think this way, hence her endless amusement.

Hillary: "Clearly you mean to say that you are absolutely not interested in being unsuited for the task."

Warren: "Right."

"Excellent, so you will carry the couch up the stairs tomorrow."

"Oh goddammit."

Hillary could call forth a vast array of terms and phrases that would vaguely negate something else in the sentence and I would inevitably logically fail, leading her to 'win' on a technicality.

I would quickly start calling her out on the double negatives when she threw them at me and we'd both grin. It became, like much of our relationship, a very good natured competition. She would introduce the triple negative. Occasionally moving to a quadruple. And it wasn't a 'not not not' situation. It would be incredibly subtle and you'd have to really unravel the argument to realize that she had negated herself several times.

Hillary would eventually start doing it almost instinctively when we were playfully debating. I got very good at calling her out on it. I never was able to keep up and when she was on her game, I lost.

But that was the game. She'd construct the argument. I'd attempt to unravel it. She'd put in clauses and things that looked like negations that weren't actually. She knew which ones I recognized and would deploy them carefully to have me miscount the number of times she had flipped the meaning.

My yes/no response would be wrong well more than the 50% of the time you'd expect via pure chance.

Instant messages, text messages, emails, conversations over the dinner table, in bed. This literally ran from our first few flirty conversations until she started to be cognitively impaired shortly before she died.

I miss talking to her so much.