This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal).
At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).
--
Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.
--
As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.
--
I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
The language pattern the author refers to is called litotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes), but to say that English doesn’t use them is… not quite right.
English does construct things this way, maybe just not with the frequency of Chinese. In fact, "not bad" is a common expression.
That said, it's true that certain flavors of US English, like marketing speak, will avoid many phrases in this family.
This is because many American English speakers will see expressions like this, particularly when not used in a directly complementary way, as either bureaucratic and avoidant or slightly pedantic or both. Because for many Americans, leaving ambiguity implies lack of confidence in the statement or evasiveness. (At the same time Americans also know not to trust confident statements - they are separately known to be "snake oily" - but we still tend to see marketing that avoids directness as even less trustworthy.)
So this mode of expression is much more common in personal speech.
The author wrote,"Because there is a vast interval between “good” and “bad,” it accommodates complex relationships." which, to me, shows they don't truly grasp the cultural context of his Chinese environment. There is the same interval between good and bad in both Chinese and Western values and thinking and terminology. What makes it seem there is a difference is the hesitancy to be affirmative in Chinese culture. To affirm some thing is to claim knowledge and expertise, and in doing _that_ comes an expectation that those around the Affirmer acquiesce to their expertise. This is another facet of Face. Very few people will claim such a level of knowledge and expertise and experience, so the words used are purposely "vague". It's not a issue with the terms.
I was once asked if I speak Chinese and I answered affirmatively, "Shi da" (very bad pinyin btw). Everyone thought that was hilarious! They were able to think it hilarious because, at the time, I was just a young single man, and my answer made it sound like I was affirming that I speak Chinese, _all of it_! But in my mind the conversation was in Chinese, I understood the question and gave an answer in Chinese, so of course I can speak it...just not fluently. I learned from that experience that a better answer is, "keyi", which is essentially "enough" but in a more humble mode and the breadth of that word itself is adapted to the context. If asked in a market about my Chinese, "keyi" means "enough to do shopping" with no claim to more than that. If in the context of a class at university, it meant "enough to do the work" but not claiming to be super smart, NOR, dumb (since it's at university). It isn't the words, it's the interpersonal culture, face, and both communicating and showing you know where you fit in.
Ah ha, so.... come to Minnesota, there's talk with !False all the time. It fits very naturally brain-wise coming from Chinese. Just, hope you're from Dongbei or similar 'cus lol weather.
Actually in Minnesota it goes way past just !False construction, in a way that also translates well from Chinese, because you get a lot of face saving phrases. Like "that's different" as a polite way of saying something is bad.
I suspect you just learned a different kind of English.
This applies to many different things, depending on the pair of languages you are using.
In Spanish the closes approximation would be "ni mal ni bien" (Not bad not wrong) but I understand the Chinese expression has a strong lean on "not being wrong".
Not so long ago (I'm 50+, Spanish native speaker, and I've spoken English for the past 30 years almost daily) I learnt about "accountability".
Now before I get a barrage of WTFs, the situation is that in Spanish we only have "Responsabilidad" and that accounts for both responsibility and accountability, with a strong lean on responsibility.
So basically we recognise what is it to be responsible of something, but being accountable is seriously diluted.
The implications of this are enormous, and this particular though exercise I'd leave for people that spend more time thinking about these things than I do.
Something that occured to me years ago is we have a quirk in English language that gets in the way of accurately emapthizing with each other, especially when trying to design things well (like products and experiences). We don't say "unwant", and we don't clearly differentiate between a lack of want and a repulsion or unwant or negative want.
Someone might say "I don't want x" or "I don't need x" and it's unclear if:
- they see no value in x
- they see small enough value in x that they don't care
- they see negative value
So much time and energy is wasted on misunderstandings that stem from this ambiguity.
It ruins products, is loses deals, it screws up projections, it confuses executives, etc.
It gets in the way of accurately empathizing with and understanding each other.
Because "I unwant x" means something extremely different than "I don't want x". Unwant implies some other value that x is getting in the way of. Understanding other peoples' values is what enables accurate empathy for them. Accurately empathizing with customers is what enables great products and predictable sales.
In Australia from my experience "not bad" = "good", "pretty good" = "amazing", "bit shit" = "really shit".
I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
I found this article pretty interesting to think about. The ideas it discusses are adjacent to a lot of what I sometimes struggle with in communication.
Meta note: my description was accidentally a great example of what I mean
> Adjacent to (not exactly the same as, but the overlap could be nearly complete)
> a lot of (not necessarily all of, but also not explicitly excluding all of)
> what I sometimes (not necessarily always, but also not explicitly excluding always)
Considering this more, I think my purpose in this intentional ambiguity is slightly different than the purpose of "not revealing one's true position" as described in the article. Rather, the problem I'm trying to pre-empt is responses that latch onto parts of what I say that aren't perfectly precisely true, but also aren't the point of what I'm trying to communicate.
It's frustrating when I'm trying to communicate a very specific idea or message and the discourse that follows ends up not engaging with that idea, so I've come to make the specific idea clear, and keep any contextual information more ambiguous to encourage focusing on the more well-defined thing.
Every single example given under “In Chinese, affirmation is often compiled through negation:” sounds completely natural to me, as a midwestern American English speaker.
However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.
This is not exclusive to the East, but any culture with a high cost of expression. Recent interview with a Russian CEO, talking about how they have "growth across the board, only in the negative direction"
There are some direct ways to express agreement in Chinese, like 對 or 好. At the same time, the negative statements described are not unique to Chinese at all. It's not that deep, really.
I suspect these sort of differences, which exist not only between Chinese and English, but also between different western cultures/languages (and I assume similarly eastern ones as well, although I'm not so familiar with them), is one of the reason why multi-lingual children typically test higher on empathy and adaptability. They learn through language the inherent different perspectives/thinking processes.
As someone who thinks about the co-evolution of language and culture quite often, I love this sort of think-piece. Gives me a bunch of my own threads to pull
I think the writers classification of this being a Chinese vs English distinction is a bit presumptuous - the portion of the USA OP is familiar with maybe, but I'll jump on the bandwagon to say this kind of negated negative language is very very common in New Zealand.
Not bad, not wrong, no problem etc etc are all very common, and we have the following too:
In modal logic sense, Chinese is inherently more □ oriented while the language in US is using ◇ more. so in Chinese ¬(□¬A) can be used to represent a possibly concept ♢A
Given the site where this is posted and the screenshot, is the author an engineer turned fiction writer? Kudos if true. Posting these must take a lot of courage.
I find the original post confused.
What it has to with code? Why putting the US as "the West"? Why the Eastern void is bad? (Oftentimes it's the Western void which is oblivion, Eastern which is nirvana.)
In Polish, 'niezły' (literally 'not bad') means 'very good'.
Even in English there are many such things, e.g. 'indestructible', 'immortal'.
When it comes to labels on food there is "no preservatives" or similar. It even has its parodies, e.g. "asbestos-free oat cereal" (https://xkcd.com/641/).
I really need to caution against looking too deep into taking these generalized words literally and deriving some insight from them that does not have independent evidence for the insight. "great" literally means big and is related to "gross", "perfect" literally means "completed", "passion" literally means "suffering", but people who use such words these days don't even have such imagery in mind at the point that they utter these words in everyday use.
In it, the author contrasts 无 (Wú) and 有 (Yǒu). For some extra context of that specific contrast, here are a couple excerpts from the first poem of the Dao De Jing. (spacing is mine)
无 名天地之始
有 名万物之母
---
故 常无欲，以观其妙
... 常有欲，以观其徼。
---
The duality of 'with' and 'without', existence / non-existence is central and embodied heavily by those 2 words.
I am (slowly) trying to learn Chinese by reading the Dao, or possibly the other way around. I ran across this site (which I have 0 affiliation with) but it seems to be a small and unique site made by someone who just wanted it to exist, which very HN: https://dao-de-jing.com/
not a native chinese speaker, but couldnt this have to do more with requiring qualifiers?
There seems to be a very strong preferrence to adding qualifiers, especially to single character words. And 不 is just one of them
很好 (very good) is strongly preferred to just a plain 好 (good). similarly youre seldom going to just say 錯 差 or 行.
So if you want to say good, and not verrryyy good, youre left with "not bad" 不錯
it still holds for 2 character words. i was told that just saying 無聊 (boring) can have a very rude conotation, though i dont quite understand the subtext (maybe someone can elucidate). But if you say 很無聊 (very boring) it weirdly enough sounds better
unqualified words as far as i understand also often look archaic. tied to the preference for 2 character words vs 1 character words (my guess is bc classical chinese is written and its hard to make out a single character word with tone when speaking)
English does this kind of thing all the time, as others have pointed out, but often to understate things somewhat. "Not bad!" actually means pretty good, but the speaker does not want to sound as if gushing. (Maybe it wasn't "fantastic", but still more than acceptable.)
Even the opening example—like if Alice said something truthful but offensive or bombastic, and Bob objects, Carol can say "Well, she's not wrong..."
Back when Americans economically feared the Japanese rather than the Chinese, there was a myth that the Japanese were so conformist that the same word meant both "to differ" and "to be wrong"—chigau (違う). Well, Japanese society is pretty conformist, ngl, but the reality is a bit more subtle. In Japanese it's incredibly rude to tell someone they're wrong so instead they say chigaimasu, "it's different".
A very interesting article hidden behind a cryptic headline. I almost didn't read it because the title makes no sense to me. That would have been my loss.
At the risk of committing the same error as the author, I am wondering if they may have been exposed almost exclusively to American English. Many of the examples of things you can't say feel perfectly natural to me, and many of the examples of what you "would" say felt a little outlandish, but certainly more "American coded".
That said, the author isn't pulling this out of his ass, more like vastly overstating it and drawing some pretty questionable conclusions.
When I'm both reading and listening to Mandarin, there does seem to be a much stronger preference for expressing positives as negated-negatives, or even sometimes expressing fairly neutral things as the absence of their opposite, than there is in any variety if English I know. But the author has latched onto that difference a little too hard I'd say.
> You name the quality directly. You point at it. You own it.
Fun thing: it works even better with Americans and Germans when it comes to negativity, because Germans also express negativity directly. For me, as a German, Americans want to be coddled and they do not like it if you clearly express to an American that he is bullshitting you. Germans (and I'd say, Germanic/Nordic-origin cultures as a whole) don't like wasting time coddling around and sucking up for no reason at all. We're an efficient people, after all.
That's also a part of why Linus Torvalds is such a polarizing figure across the Internet. To me as a German, yes, he could dial down the ad-hominem a bit but that's it. The constant American whining about his tone however is... grating on my nerves. He's speaking the truth, accept it for what it is and move the fuck on.
Oh, and it's also why Wal-Mart failed so disastrously many decades ago when they tried to enter Germany. Ignoring labor rights was bad enough, but we could have let that slide (given that our own discounters were all heavily embroiled in scandals)... but what was just way too uncanny from what I hear from older people who actually lived during that time was the greeters. And it matches up with many a write-up [1].
Something about this article strikes home for me. I default to 'not bad' for something I don't actively dislike; past that it's a pretty substantial jump to get to 'good', at probably about the same point I'd be willing to actively recommend something to someone else, and then even more substantial to get to anything like 'great'.
> English would say: “He was right.” Or “He guessed correctly.” Direct. Affirmative. Landed. Right is right, wrong is wrong. You don’t say ‘not wrong.’
Is the article's assertion about English true, though? And specifically about British English and maybe a slightly outdated version of the language?
Because George Mikes in the humorous "How to be an Alien" (which is a comical book giving advice to foreigners like himself on how to integrate into UK society) explains again and again that "the English" [1] never say things directly. For example (I'm quoting from memory) he explains how a man may refer to his fiancé affectionately: "I don't object to you, you know". And if he's mad with love: "in fact, I rather fancy you". He also explains that when an Englishman says you're "clever", he's disgusted with you, as being "clever" is a bad trait, very un-English.
So it seems Chinese and (some versions of) English are not that different.
Do note Mikes book was written in the 40s though. And of course it's a work of humor, but there's truth to it.
[1] according to Mikes, when people say "the English / England" they sometimes mean the British Isles, sometimes Great Britain -- but never England.
The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void
(suggger.substack.com)122 points by Suggger 11 December 2025 | 145 comments
Comments
At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).
--
Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.
--
As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.
--
I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
That said, it's true that certain flavors of US English, like marketing speak, will avoid many phrases in this family.
This is because many American English speakers will see expressions like this, particularly when not used in a directly complementary way, as either bureaucratic and avoidant or slightly pedantic or both. Because for many Americans, leaving ambiguity implies lack of confidence in the statement or evasiveness. (At the same time Americans also know not to trust confident statements - they are separately known to be "snake oily" - but we still tend to see marketing that avoids directness as even less trustworthy.)
So this mode of expression is much more common in personal speech.
I was once asked if I speak Chinese and I answered affirmatively, "Shi da" (very bad pinyin btw). Everyone thought that was hilarious! They were able to think it hilarious because, at the time, I was just a young single man, and my answer made it sound like I was affirming that I speak Chinese, _all of it_! But in my mind the conversation was in Chinese, I understood the question and gave an answer in Chinese, so of course I can speak it...just not fluently. I learned from that experience that a better answer is, "keyi", which is essentially "enough" but in a more humble mode and the breadth of that word itself is adapted to the context. If asked in a market about my Chinese, "keyi" means "enough to do shopping" with no claim to more than that. If in the context of a class at university, it meant "enough to do the work" but not claiming to be super smart, NOR, dumb (since it's at university). It isn't the words, it's the interpersonal culture, face, and both communicating and showing you know where you fit in.
Actually in Minnesota it goes way past just !False construction, in a way that also translates well from Chinese, because you get a lot of face saving phrases. Like "that's different" as a polite way of saying something is bad.
I suspect you just learned a different kind of English.
In Spanish the closes approximation would be "ni mal ni bien" (Not bad not wrong) but I understand the Chinese expression has a strong lean on "not being wrong".
Not so long ago (I'm 50+, Spanish native speaker, and I've spoken English for the past 30 years almost daily) I learnt about "accountability".
Now before I get a barrage of WTFs, the situation is that in Spanish we only have "Responsabilidad" and that accounts for both responsibility and accountability, with a strong lean on responsibility.
So basically we recognise what is it to be responsible of something, but being accountable is seriously diluted.
The implications of this are enormous, and this particular though exercise I'd leave for people that spend more time thinking about these things than I do.
Someone might say "I don't want x" or "I don't need x" and it's unclear if:
- they see no value in x
- they see small enough value in x that they don't care
- they see negative value
So much time and energy is wasted on misunderstandings that stem from this ambiguity.
It ruins products, is loses deals, it screws up projections, it confuses executives, etc.
It gets in the way of accurately empathizing with and understanding each other.
Because "I unwant x" means something extremely different than "I don't want x". Unwant implies some other value that x is getting in the way of. Understanding other peoples' values is what enables accurate empathy for them. Accurately empathizing with customers is what enables great products and predictable sales.
I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
Meta note: my description was accidentally a great example of what I mean
> Adjacent to (not exactly the same as, but the overlap could be nearly complete) > a lot of (not necessarily all of, but also not explicitly excluding all of) > what I sometimes (not necessarily always, but also not explicitly excluding always)
Considering this more, I think my purpose in this intentional ambiguity is slightly different than the purpose of "not revealing one's true position" as described in the article. Rather, the problem I'm trying to pre-empt is responses that latch onto parts of what I say that aren't perfectly precisely true, but also aren't the point of what I'm trying to communicate.
It's frustrating when I'm trying to communicate a very specific idea or message and the discourse that follows ends up not engaging with that idea, so I've come to make the specific idea clear, and keep any contextual information more ambiguous to encourage focusing on the more well-defined thing.
However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Not bad, not wrong, no problem etc etc are all very common, and we have the following too:
Nah yeah = yes
Yeah nah = no
Yeah nah yeah = yes
Nah yeah nah = no
...extend outward to your hearts desire
(yes people commonly say all of the above)
> Nice
> Great
> Perfect
> Brilliant
Flawless
Spotless
Impeccable (Latin: in (not) + pecare (to sin))
Immaculate (Latin: in (not) + macula (stain))
Unerring
In Polish, 'niezły' (literally 'not bad') means 'very good'. Even in English there are many such things, e.g. 'indestructible', 'immortal'.
When it comes to labels on food there is "no preservatives" or similar. It even has its parodies, e.g. "asbestos-free oat cereal" (https://xkcd.com/641/).
Instead of saying: "Not cloudy at all today", say "Clear sky today, some scattered clouds though".
In general, always speak in a positive straightforward way, even when you want to confuse someone.
无 名天地之始
有 名万物之母
---
故 常无欲，以观其妙
... 常有欲，以观其徼。
---
The duality of 'with' and 'without', existence / non-existence is central and embodied heavily by those 2 words.
I am (slowly) trying to learn Chinese by reading the Dao, or possibly the other way around. I ran across this site (which I have 0 affiliation with) but it seems to be a small and unique site made by someone who just wanted it to exist, which very HN: https://dao-de-jing.com/
There seems to be a very strong preferrence to adding qualifiers, especially to single character words. And 不 is just one of them
很好 (very good) is strongly preferred to just a plain 好 (good). similarly youre seldom going to just say 錯 差 or 行.
So if you want to say good, and not verrryyy good, youre left with "not bad" 不錯
it still holds for 2 character words. i was told that just saying 無聊 (boring) can have a very rude conotation, though i dont quite understand the subtext (maybe someone can elucidate). But if you say 很無聊 (very boring) it weirdly enough sounds better
unqualified words as far as i understand also often look archaic. tied to the preference for 2 character words vs 1 character words (my guess is bc classical chinese is written and its hard to make out a single character word with tone when speaking)
hopefully a native speaker can weight in...
Even the opening example—like if Alice said something truthful but offensive or bombastic, and Bob objects, Carol can say "Well, she's not wrong..."
Back when Americans economically feared the Japanese rather than the Chinese, there was a myth that the Japanese were so conformist that the same word meant both "to differ" and "to be wrong"—chigau (違う). Well, Japanese society is pretty conformist, ngl, but the reality is a bit more subtle. In Japanese it's incredibly rude to tell someone they're wrong so instead they say chigaimasu, "it's different".
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was disproved.
That said, the author isn't pulling this out of his ass, more like vastly overstating it and drawing some pretty questionable conclusions.
When I'm both reading and listening to Mandarin, there does seem to be a much stronger preference for expressing positives as negated-negatives, or even sometimes expressing fairly neutral things as the absence of their opposite, than there is in any variety if English I know. But the author has latched onto that difference a little too hard I'd say.
Fun thing: it works even better with Americans and Germans when it comes to negativity, because Germans also express negativity directly. For me, as a German, Americans want to be coddled and they do not like it if you clearly express to an American that he is bullshitting you. Germans (and I'd say, Germanic/Nordic-origin cultures as a whole) don't like wasting time coddling around and sucking up for no reason at all. We're an efficient people, after all.
That's also a part of why Linus Torvalds is such a polarizing figure across the Internet. To me as a German, yes, he could dial down the ad-hominem a bit but that's it. The constant American whining about his tone however is... grating on my nerves. He's speaking the truth, accept it for what it is and move the fuck on.
Oh, and it's also why Wal-Mart failed so disastrously many decades ago when they tried to enter Germany. Ignoring labor rights was bad enough, but we could have let that slide (given that our own discounters were all heavily embroiled in scandals)... but what was just way too uncanny from what I hear from older people who actually lived during that time was the greeters. And it matches up with many a write-up [1].
[1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
Is the article's assertion about English true, though? And specifically about British English and maybe a slightly outdated version of the language?
Because George Mikes in the humorous "How to be an Alien" (which is a comical book giving advice to foreigners like himself on how to integrate into UK society) explains again and again that "the English" [1] never say things directly. For example (I'm quoting from memory) he explains how a man may refer to his fiancé affectionately: "I don't object to you, you know". And if he's mad with love: "in fact, I rather fancy you". He also explains that when an Englishman says you're "clever", he's disgusted with you, as being "clever" is a bad trait, very un-English.
So it seems Chinese and (some versions of) English are not that different.
Do note Mikes book was written in the 40s though. And of course it's a work of humor, but there's truth to it.
[1] according to Mikes, when people say "the English / England" they sometimes mean the British Isles, sometimes Great Britain -- but never England.