... Not!

For other uses of the word, see Not (disambiguation).

... Not! is a grammatical construction in the English language used as a function word to make negative a group of words or a word.^[1] It became a sardonic catchphrase in North America and elsewhere in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause, and then an emphatic "not!" adverb is postfixed. The result is a surprise 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.

One of the earliest uses was in the Princeton Tiger (March 30, 1893) 103: "An Historical Parallel-- Not." In 1905, it was used in the comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend by Winsor McCay. A 1918 instance was "I am darn sorry not to be able to help you out with the News Letter, but in me you have a fund of information—NOT."^[2]

Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the Saturday Night Live sketch and subsequent film Wayne's World,^[3] "not" 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 film Borat, in which a lecturer in humour attempted to explain the grammatical construction to Borat Sagdiyev with limited success.

See also

• Privative, a particle that inverts the meaning of the word stem to which it is affixed.