This is another of those annoying language things that stems from my rather literal language processing unit. See my previous post about starting letters. I am not far enough into the spectrum to follow instructions or comprehension literally but I do struggle trying to answer negative questions in a true manner. Once again there common usage issues that I believe to be amazingly wrong but most people seem to accept them.
If something is amazing then the following:
Is that an amazing aircraft manoeuvre?
is easy to answer. Yes for agreeing with the statement and no for disagreeing. However the question:
Isn’t that an amazing aircraft manoeuvre?
is remarkably hard to answer. I believe the vernacular is to answer “yes” if I am saying that it is an amazing manoeuvre. But if I answer “yes” then I think I am agreeing with the statement which is
Is that not an amazing manoeuvre?
and that reverses the meaning of my answer. Arrrrggghhh! Similarly other questions can confuse me enough that I answer very differently. So, if I had just seen an amazing manoeuvre then the following would be the conversation:
“wasn’t that an amazing manoeuvre?”
“It was amazing”
This means I have not answered an impossible question and also managed to keep my head from exploding with diverse logic implications.
Other examples are:
“aren’t you going to the cinema?”
“isn’t that band great?”
So, please don’t ask me perfectly normal questions, it just hurts.