I can’t resist:

Now consider again Skinner’s sentence:

Justice is not a frivolous thing, Simpson. It has little if anything to do with a disobedient whale.

This seems amenable to a quantificational analysis: the set of situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale is a subset of the set of situations in which justice has little to do with a disobedient whale. Equivalently, there are no situations in which justice has anything to do with a disobedient whale, in which justice doesn’t have little to do with a disobedient whale.

Earlier today I read one of the weekly emails from my VP and found myself thinking, there are some things that really don’t make a lot of sense without context and sound very strange and funny when presented alone. And I think justice not having anything to do with a disobedient whale is definitely one of them.