No News is Good News

Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

Or so the saying goes. I believe this refers to the situation where you assume the absence of a response to be a positive rather than an assertion that all news is definitively bad. Its typical of grossly understated English hyperbole — for something to be potentially catastrophic yet not wanting to make too much of a fuss.

Its a particularly English thing (the nation rather than the language) to be both emphatic and self…