"Nothing is better than Aleve." That advertising slogan for the popular pain reliever drew this response from one of my waggish readers: "Nothing is better than Aleve, so I take nothing."

We use and encounter ambiguous phrases and sentences like this every day, often without pausing to consider their dubious logic. Like the slogan for Aleve, many of them involve the expression of a negative sense, indicated by words such as "nothing," "aren't" an ...

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