 Beyond its marked status, negation has also been analyzed variously as a modality, a propositional attitude, and a speech act. The danger here is putting the pragmatic cart before the semantic horse. For example, not every negation is a speaker denial (in making this point, Frege points to the non-denial nature of embedded negation as in “If not-\(p\) then \(q\)”), nor is every speaker denial a linguistic negation. Given the repeated attempts over the centuries to liquidate or tame it—negation as positive difference, as dissimilarity or incompatibility, as falsity, as an admission of epistemic impoverishment, as the speech act of denial—and its resilience in surviving these attacks, negation qualifies as the Rasputin of the propositional calculus.