Even Changes

Colloquial English has a habit of affirming things through negation of the opposite. One example of this is confirming that someone is correct about something by saying that: "They're not wrong." But since one of the functions of idiom is to make language more random, the meaning completely changes if "even" is added to that sentence; "They're not even wrong," is a way of saying that what the person has said is so completely nonsensical that it can't even be evaluated as correct or incorrect.

 It's interesting, in part because of the shift introduced by a change in the usage of "even," which is already one of those words where the meaning can't always even be inferred by context. The difference between the role of even in various negations, like "it's not even raining" and "that's not even a smart idea" sometimes simply has committed to memory.

The use of even in "not even wrong" has been traced back to theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Pauli, who was said to have used it to describe reasoning so faulty or speculative that it couldn't be discussed rigorously or scientifically. In the 70 or so years since the phrase was first coined in German, it's managed to find its way into English where it's become something of a general-purpose putdown of a person's argument, especially online. Which is kind of too bad, because it's a useful phrase; there are a number of times when speculation about a topic gets a bit out of hand, and the resulting conclusions come across as being completely out of left field.