Talk:something to write home about

I don't think this form is "chiefly used with negation", although it might apply to "to write home about". General Vicinity (talk) 02:07, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

I think I hear it negated the majority of the time. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 05:05, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

On the one hand, nothing to write home about is obviously more common than something to write home about; as a crude metric, it has roughly five times as many Google hits, and Google Ngram Viewer shows a similar ratio.

My interpretation of General Vicinity's comment is that they're making a different claim, though. What I think they're trying to say is that the specific form "something to write home about" (as opposed to "nothing to write home about") is not chiefly used in negative polarity contexts. This question is less obvious. As a relatively quick test, I searched for "something to write home about" (in quotation marks) on Google Books, and limited the query to books with full view or preview available, overlooking results that didn't use it in a full sentence. On the first two pages, the majority of results were not in negative polarity contexts. I was able to replicate this finding by looking at the first few pages of Internet Archive results. 70.172.194.25 05:19, 24 September 2022 (UTC)