"Do I not like that"
Language Log 2017-01-19
Graham Taylor has died at the age of 72, after a long and varied career as a manager and coach of English football teams. But this is Language Log, not English Football Log, and so we'll leave the obsequies to others and focus on Mr. Taylor's best known quotation, "Do I not like that":
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That audio clip comes from the sound track of "Do i not like that….The Final Chapter", another name for (part of?) the documentary "An Impossible Job", about which Wikipedia tells us:
Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job, also known as Do I Not Like That, is a 1994 British fly-on-the-wall documentary directed and produced by Ken McGill, written by Patrick Collins, and made by Chrysalis for Cutting Edge. The documentary follows the England football team through the 18 months before their failure to qualify for the 1994 FIFA World Cup Finals and gave an insight into revealing the pressure manager Graham Taylor was under before his resignation.
The signature quotation was Taylor's filmed reaction to a goal by Poland:
The documentary follows Graham Taylor before, during and after England's crucial qualifier against the Netherlands in Rotterdam.
England's campaign started poorly with a home draw against Norway in October 1992. Taylor's subsequent touchline performances included the quotes "Do I not like that" and "Can we not knock it?!" from an away game against Poland in May 1993. During the following game, with England 2-0 down in Norway in June and running through their repertoire of misplaced passes, Taylor can be heard crumbling off-screen, a couple of resigned "hells fucking bells".
The linguistic question is, why was "Do I not like that" an appropriate and resonant response to an opposing team's score?
The subject-auxiliary inversion of do separate from not is an archaic feature apparently preserved in the kind of English that Taylor grew up with:
Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, Taylor grew up in the industrial steel town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire […]
And I'm guessing that the inversion itself is emphatic, as in "Did he ever!", rather than signaling an ironic self-addressed question. That is, the meaning is "I really don't like that", not "Is it the case that I don't like that?"
But I'll leave this issue to commenters who know more about English dialectal pragmatics than I do.