"It's a good way to rationalize beating the shit out of kids."
—Rolling Stone politics editor Andrew Perez on the "outside agitators" myth in reporting on campus protests, in an interview for On the Media
A weird feature of English I didn't understand until college was an important meaning of the word "negative." As a kid I knew the mathematical meaning ("less than zero") and the colloquial meaning ("bad"). The third, metaphysical meaning of the word is "defined by absence, rather than by presence."