When somebody uses the phrase "not uncommon", do they mean "common" because of the double negative?
I was recently informed that "not uncommon" could imply that something was anything but uncommon (e.g. rare), whereas I thought that rare would be a subset of uncommon and that saying it was not uncommon must mean it is common.
First, I think a little more context may be needed to appropriately answer your question since it seems whoever you've been talking to has what I would consider to be a non-standard usage of it. That being said, here's my best cut.
In standard usage, the phrase "not uncommon" typically means something to the effect of "more frequent than uncommon". That is, it occurs too frequently to be considered "uncommon", but not necessarily so frequently as to be labeled "common".
However, in certain contexts where things are partitioned using discrete, well defined terms "uncommon", "rare", etc. it would be conceivable that they would mean "anything other than uncommon". The one example that jumps out at me is RPG games like World of Warcraft where item quality is labeled using terms like "rare", "uncommon", "common", etc. In a case like this, saying that something is "not uncommon" would potentially allow for something labeled as "rare" as well as something labeled as "common"
"not uncommon" is not necessarily the same as common. Compare the following examples:
1-0 is a common final score in soccer (it happens all the time)
8-7 is an uncommon final score in soccer (it rarely happens)
5-0 is not an uncommon final score in soccer (it doesn't happen all the time, but it's not rare either).
To my mind, it is a shaded meaning, not quite common, but not rare. "Not unkind" I would see as much colder than kind, but not actively unkind.
Not really. It means just what it says it is. It's an attempt at understatement. To baldly say something is common seems to some people too forthright. And, to be fair, there may be a wide gap between what is uncommon and what is common. If the subject is sunny days in Seattle, you may say they are uncommon. But Seattle averages about one day in six with sunshine. So you could say, with some legitimacy, that they are not uncommon since they are experienced with some regularity. Still, you wouldn't really say they were common.
Nevertheless, such constructions are anathema to some champions of clear writing. I remember Eric Blair (George Orwell) mocking them in one of his essays on the English language, positing a sentence like (I'm paraphrasing here) "The not unbrown dog trotted not unslowly along the not unrough road, finally making a not unsmall leap over the not unhigh fence." Or something like that. I was an undergrad at the time, so memory dims. I wish I could remember the name of the essay.
Describing something by negating its opposite is a way of countering expectations. As in: "You might expect this never happens, but it is not uncommon." Or: "Not bad... for a girl."
This is an example of a common (and ancient) figure of speech called litotes. Sometimes it conveys no extra meaning (and gets ridiculed as an affectation) but in many cases it does have a distinct meaning.
