Let's see if we can't get that to work...
I had a boss who inverted the can/can't statement. I'm sure he learned it from someone.To me, it always sounded like a statement of failure. Why would you 'not' want something to work?
"Let's see if we can't get that to work..."
No boss, let's see if we CAN get that to work!
Comments (7)
It's just the way people talk that doesn't always make sense!
I like accents though!
'You're not from round here are you'
'That's not a local accent'
'Are you from Australia?'
So!
However @op 'whether we can't get that to work' is perfectly logical. In attacking a problem to be solved in a limited time you will discover whether you can or cannot solve it. According to Goedel's theorem, there are infinitely many propositions which cannot be proven or disproven, but of these you can be sure it cannot be proven that they cannot be proven, whereas with provability you have some possibility!
Speaking of limited time, Fermat's Last Theorem (for which he had a super-neat proof he said) took 358 years to solve in 1994.