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Effort is usually quoted as a minimum ("It takes 20 minutes to drive there" "It costs $100 to buy this") which leads to a strange quirk that the negative is then interpreted as being a lower minimum, rather than a higher one ("It does not take 20min to drive there, "it does not cost $100 to buy this")


Your examples make me wonder if the language of marketing has changed our assumptions about implied meanings where otherwise we'd recognize ambiguity.

Or perhaps, marketing aside, it is just human nature to conjure implicit meaning rather than be confronted with ambiguity.




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