Maybe George W. Bush’s neologism misunderestimate isn’t such a bad candidate for adoption into the lexicon. That’s what I decided shortly after reading the following passage in a New York Times article about the various adaptations of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho:
Mr. Bale’s role in Bateman’s liftoff is impossible to underestimate. You can trace the character’s ascent along the arc of the actor’s career. (Bateman, Batman, Bale, baleful — there’s a malevolent linguistic richness in this subject matter.) He’s slowly become recognized as the dominant actor of his generation.
I had to read the paragraph twice. Its first sentence suggested to me that Mr. Bateman’s role was so minute that no underestimation of it would reach the microscopic level of its influence. But then there’s the next sentence, talking of “ascent,” and the final one asserting Mr. Bateman’s dominance. Could the writer (and the inattentive editor) have confused underestimate with overestimate? Somehow that seemed unlikely.
Googling the phrase, I found multiple discussions of this problem. For years, apparently, writers have been penning impossible to underestimate when they mean the opposite. The problem lies not with the prefix over- or under-, but with its proximity to the adjective impossible. Mark Liberman, in Language Log entries from 2007 and 2009, attributes the problem to our “poor monkey brains” that cannot logically process both the negative of impossible and the concept of underestimate in the same phrase. Apparently we commit much the same error when we write shouldn’t be overestimated, meaning cannot be overestimated or shouldn’t be underestimated.
What I find interesting is that we seem to misunderestimate, if I may co-opt Bush’s coinage, more than we misoverestimate. Searching the Corpus of Contemporary American English, I found five recent instances of impossible to underestimate, all of them meaning shouldn’t be underestimated. A parallel search of should not overestimate, by contrast, yielded four recent examples, all of which cautioned readers not to inflate whatever was being talked about. Google’s Ngram Viewer shows a spike in cannot be underestimated from 1960 to the present day, and in every instance I scanned, the intended meaning was the opposite. The same did not hold true for formulations with overestimate.
Maybe we hear under as negative and over as positive speech. Perhaps — and this would account for the steep rise in cannot be underestimated since 1960 — we are increasingly averse to being told what we should or should not do. Since large influence is more noteworthy than small influence, the instruction not to underestimate finds more print than its opposite. And rather than instructing readers not to underestimate, writers tell them it is impossible, yielding such recent head-scratchers as these:
“It was an evolution of a product that was hard,” Limp, who is Amazon’s SVP of Device, told Business Insider. “I can’t underestimate the amount of work and invention that went into this.” (Business Insider)
One cannot underestimate the importance of flexibility and openness that a small trading state needs to prosper. (South China Morning Post)
It may be almost impossible to underestimate the gullibility of professional Fed watchers. At least Lucy van Pelt needed to place an actual football on the ground to fool poor Charlie Brown. (Real Clear Markets)
My theory is pure conjecture, of course. I welcome other thoughts as to why this phrase is rising in frequency even as it clings to confusion. I’ll close by noting the one instance in which I found a negative + underestimate used in its logical, literal sense, when a commenter on CNN noted that it would be impossible to underestimate Sarah Palin’s current influence. No misunderestimation, that belief allows some of us to sleep at night.
N.B. re last week’s post on the Saxon genitive, taken to an extreme in last Sunday’s New York Times article on heroin violence in St. Louis:
Those who have succumbed to the drug include a nephew of Steve Stenger’s, the St. Louis County executive, who died from an overdose in 2014. A brother of Mayor Francis Slay’s was arrested on a charge of heroin possession in 2012, and the stepson of Jennifer Joyce’s, the city’s top prosecutor, was arrested on the same charge last month.
Defeat the hobgoblin of consistency, I say; suppress that apostrophe-s before an appositive!