Tag: NOT

Not! is a grammatical construction in the English language that became a sarcastic catchphrase in North America in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause and then an emphatic “not!” is postfixed. The result is a negation of the original declarative statement.
According to the above, the phrase “He is a nice guy… not!” is synonymous to “He is not a nice guy”. Whereas the latter structure is a neutral observation, the former expresses rather an annoyance, and is most often used jocularly.
Popularized in North America in the 1990s by a Saturday Night Live skit and subsequent movie Wayne’s World, it can be found earliest in print in an 1893 Princeton Tiger (March 30) 103: “An Historical Parallel– Not.” It was such a popular catch phrase that it was selected as the 1992 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
The “Not!” catchphrase was the basis of a scene in the 2006 movie Borat where a lecturer in humour attempted to explain the grammatical…