... Not! (original) (raw)

... Not! is a grammatical construction in the English language used as a function word to make negative a group of words or a word. It became a sardonic catchphrase in North America and elsewhere in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause, and then an emphatic "not!" adverb is postfixed. The result is a surprise negation of the original declarative statement. Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the Saturday Night Live sketch and subsequent film Wayne's World, "not" was selected as the 1992 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.