Carry on, Darius!

Because common English adopted the Midlands structure for verb negation (“do not X” instead of “X not”) it allows us to affix adverbs to “do.” So we can say “do not really know” and “really do not know” and the meaning changes. This is something we couldn’t do with traditional negation: “really know not” and “know really not” are much closer in meaning if they even parse correctly, though I suppose “do not know really” and “know not really” should be the same.

So to Lispize it:
(((advq ashamedly (not (do ‘understand))) (pipeline ‘art))

It’s all about LISP, see. In LISP, you wouldn’t have had this problem. It would have been:

(((ashamedly not) understand) (pipeline art))

Instead he has written:

((not (ashamedly understand)) (pipeline art))

PS: Blogger’s fuckin’ up again. REALLY fuckin’ up. This ten-second post took me ten minutes to post.

The pre-adverb is more likely an aesthetic and focus-grabbing reordering of the post-adverb, and is probably convergent with the speaker-centric gerund clause that prefixes a sentence: Realistically speaking… metaphorically speaking… embarassingly speaking?

Inheriting from the colloquially damaged “Embarrassingly, I don’t understand”, I suppose? Nooooooooo! It hurts my brain! THAT is a descendant of the colloquially damaged “Quickly, Igor, the brain!” in which an adverb is placed at the front of the sentence and a verb is often times omitted. But the pre-adverb still applies to the (often imaginary) verb.

Made up grammar mutating into flat-out wrong grammar… and now it’s propagating! Arrrrrrgggggh… (Froth)

Okay, I suppose it’s not really that big a deal. The link is good.