Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.
To me:
"He wasn't worse than many ponies" means there were not many ponies that he was worse than. That is, he was a very good pony.
"He wasn't any worse than many ponies" means there are many, but still a minority, of ponies that he wasn't worse than. That is, he was a pretty bad pony.
Do they sound that way to you? Why the difference?
Page generated in 0.032 seconds
Total duration
657 users online
760,056 hits today, 2,591,549 yesterday
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Not sure about the former, but the latter seems to make a statement about ponies in general: "I am not any worse than anyone else." Ergo: whatever you don't like about me can be found equally in my peers. It could mean he is an average guy who is hard on himself -- the phrase could be used to absolve someone of general failings. It could also mean he is a terrible person in denial: I am not bad because other people do stuff that is equally bad. The final analysis would depend on context.
Well, the use of "any" means he is as bad as a majority, though I think "any worse" generally means that the individual in question is about average, rather than actually bad. Saying that he is not worse without any qualifier however does imply that he is a good pony.
REVISED:
Okay, I think I can perhaps see why you're sticking with 'many' rather than 'most', now that I've taken longer to think about this.
But to me, these two phrases are functionally equivalent. I don't really understand any difference between them, except that the latter is more linguistically natural and a bit wordier.
Hmmm... first one sounds actually sounds to me there are many bad ponies and he wasn't worse than them, meaning not as bad but still bad, while the second makes makes him sound all around better than most of the bad ponies, maybe even good.
First, I'd swap the 'many's for 'most's. Reads better, and more clearly implies that we're discussing 'majorities'
As for the two statements, the former seems to say that most ponies are at least average to above average, and he was not worse than them. Ergo, he is approx. equal to them.
The latter implies that most ponies are average at best and likely below average. Ergo, he is 'no worse than' or just as average as the others.
Those two phrases look roughly equivalent to me, except that the second one puts slightly extra emphasis on 'worse'. They're both saying that the person involved is mediocre at best.
Both, to me, sound like folksy ways of saying "he wasn't any worse than most."
To be perhaps a bit more specific than is warranted, they sound like something that would be said by someone who is affecting folksiness, rather than someone who genuinely is rural and plainspoken.
But in either case I doubt the speaker would parse the sentence as closely as you have. One thing I've found about writing dialog is that it has to sound as if the speaker has not had any time to think in advance about what they will say, for that is how most conversation takes place.
This must be one of those weird salt-water induced idiomatic differences. They both mean the same thing to my ear.
But then I do live in a country where the highest form of praise is "it's not so bad"...
The first one is okay. They're both awkward.
It seems to me the same kind of unintuitive linguistic puzzle posed by "I couldn't care less", with about the same solution.
"Wasn't worse" is basically a double negative that functions as "was better." Adding the "any" makes it say that the subject's quality is equal to or greater than that of many ponies. Basically, you go from > to ≥. At least, that's how it sounds to me.
I think part of it is that English (in various dialects) has verb phrases that have their own meaning slightly different from the sum of their parts. "Not any worse" is one such common phrase, implying that something may or may not be bad, but if it is then so is most everything else in the set. "Not worse" in the first sentence is not a common phrase, so it is parsed by the individual words alone, which is why its meaning is more variable among readers, and also why it seems so much clunkier.
Slight digression, but I think verb "phrases" of this sort cause quite a few grammar arguments, as well. A lot of common verb phrases are verb + preposition like "going to", "coming from", "thinking about", and for many these become inseparable, meaning that in the language part of our brain, "going to" is a single verb with a slightly different (and more specific) meaning than "going" + "to". The problem comes with relative clauses, which often have the verb moved to the end of the clause (and thus the sentence). When the verb of the relative clause is a verb phrase like this, most speakers move the whole phrase to the end of the sentence, and that's how you get sentences ending with a preposition so often, which drives some grammar nazis up a wall. This is just my opinion on an odd linguistic phenomenon in English, I have never read this theory anywhere else that I can recall.
Oh, fun fact: in Old and Middle English, multiple negatives simply intensified the negative, rather than cancelling out. So saying someone "wasn't worse than others" meant that they were way worse than others. If someone "wasn't no worse, neither" than they were truly terrible.
2755692
What happened if the descriptor wasn't positive or negative? Like, "Waldere wasn't no taller than Alfred?"
I'm sorry. I don't agree with you that either of those sentences has a clear message.
Both sentences are so ambiguous they are almost entirely devoid of meaning. With any sizeable group, you cannot meaningfully use "many" as a comparative between individual and group in the same way that you can with "most" or "few".
You can use "many" to assert the non-isolated existence of something within a group. "Many ponies wear hats," would not tell me anything about how rare hat-wearing is (it could still be extremely rare to meet a pony who wears hats). It does, however, suggest that hat-wearing is not an isolated case: all pony hat-wearers should not be clustered in the same location or subgroup or stratum, because "many" was not qualified.
However, you cannot use this at all to compare one individual to its group. It's weasel-y to try, and the intended meaning is unclear. "He wears hats more often than many ponies," is entirely uninformative. It tells me nothing whatsoever about how often he wears hats. There are likely 'many' ponies who wear hats daily, and 'many' ponies who never wear hats. All I can derive from this sentence is he has worn a hat at least once. And in this case, the sentence should be, "He has worn a hat at least once."
The pony writing either of these sentences doesn't know how to say what they wish to say. They could be trying to say any number of things and it would be useless to try to parse meaning unless you had other examples of them using the same language in writing, and even then I wouldn't trust a parse. In most cases I would have to assume the author intended to use the word "most", or perhaps "a good proportion of" or something. But I rarely see something written this ambiguously even in bad writing.
2755736 Negation just stacks, so in that example Waldere is shorter than (or equal height to) Alfred. Basically, if you negate a sentence, multiple negations intensify, always, while in Modern formal English multiple negatives cancel each other out like boolean logic. So, for example, "I can't not go to the Gala" in modern English means "I must go to the Gala", but in Middle English means "I really can not go to the Gala". You can see this sort of thing a LOT in Chaucer.
I specify Modern formal English because the older use still occurs in colloquial English all the time. You're own example, "he weren't no taller", would usually be understood to mean "he was not taller" even today, with the assumption that the speaker is speaking informally. Or the assumption that the speaker is stupid, more likely, though this usage is a feature of dialect, not intelligence.
My parsing of the sentences is identical to 2755230's, I think for the reason that 2755785 pointed out: "many" is not a synonym for "most" here. "He wasn't worse than most ponies" is (faint) praise; "he wasn't worse than many ponies" implies a sizable subgroup of bad ponies at the bottom of the barrel who he's being compared to.
That said, 2755596 is the smartest comment in the thread.
2755692
Today I learned! Also, obligatory inquiry as to your knowledge of Old English.
2755596
I really like reading your comments! 
I could easily care less about what you write, PP.
2756031 Minimal, I'm afraid. I know of Old English, and that it is a Germanic language closely related to modern German and Dutch. And that's about it. I can read Middle English with copious footnotes, and Early Modern English (Shakespeare era) with no footnotes at all, but nothing older. I've only read Old English literature translated into modern, like Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.
(Actually, if you don't have that already, you might want to look for it. It is a parallel text, with the original Anglo-Saxon on even numbered pages and the modern translation on the facing page. Having both right next to each other might give you a good idea about the meanings of longer phrases/passages. Plus, if you use anything from it, you'll be quoting Beowulf, that's worth major geek points right there.)
In the OP, if being not the worst pony makes one liable to be a terrible pony, well we're no longer judging that pony, were asserting that the distribution allows for a truly prodigious amount of bad ponies.
I have to go with pedantry in the terms here. "Many" to me, intrprets as troll counting. "One. Two. Many." That is, "many" is any number greater than two. "He wasn't worse than (at least) two ponies." Which does read about the same was "He wasn't worse than any two (arbitrarily worst) ponies."
"He wasn't worse than many ponies, in fact, there were few ponies better than he.
"He wasn't worse than many ponies, he was worse than all of them."
Could also be read as "He was no worse than...", which seems less clunky.EDIT: I realised that "He was no worse than..." is similar to "He wasn't any worse than..."
One way or another he's an outlier.
"He wasn't any worse than many ponies, he was actually ok when you got to know him."
"He wasn't any worse than many ponies, but he was still a dick."
Either way, he's around the middle of the bell-curve of pony quality.
Just my take on it.
"...wasn't worse..." sounds horrible though.