  Like Aristotle, Jespersen predicts that the negation of true contraries like unhappy, unjust, or unwise will be semantically distinct from their positive bases. Thus, not unhappy fails to reduce to happy by virtue of allowing an unexcluded middle: one can be neither happy nor unhappy but just blaah, in the same way that something can be neither black nor white but one of the fifty-plus shades of gray. At the same time, even those adjectives that are semantic contradictories, e.g. impossible, may be coerced under negation into virtual contraries. While technically any action or event must be either possible or impossible, to assess something as not impossible is often to portray its occurrence as a more remote possibility than to assess it as possible simpliciter, as reflected in attestations of “It’s possible, or at least not impossible”. Similar instances of virtual contrariety are readily attested with negated verb phrases (“I don’t NOT love the dog” ≠ I love the dog) or predicate nominals (“We’re not NOT friends” ≠ We’re friends); see Horn 2017.