I Don't Refuse To Accept That This Is Not Butter.

You know when you're searching for a book in a library and you have to say the alphabet aloud over and over as you walk through the rows? I obviously know that f comes before g, but I'll be damned if I can remember it without whispering the song quickly to myself.

Well, multiply that speedy whisper by a thousand and you have an idea of the schizophrenic mess I looked like in college while taking exams in my logic classes. The idea was to prove if a statement was true, but all you really need to know about these tests is that they consisted of A LOT of double negatives. Not not A LOT. There were so many negations in these exams that I had no choice but to read everything out loud so that my head didn't explode.

It went something like this:

"If not A is true then A is not true, false, so not true, then not not A is not not not...." [Boom.]

It was during this time that I seriously tried to get the double negative "NOT!" craze going.

"You look good! Not! (pause) Not!"

"What?"

"You look nice."

But to this day whenever I hear someone use a double negative I get a really distant look and go off into my head stringing together groups of nots. Not knots, but nots.

[Boom. ]

So since the first time I heard Meredith repeat the bit about I Can't Believe It's Not Butter from The Vicar of Dibley, I've been unable to shake it. Sure, I forget about it from time to time, but one mention of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter and I can't not start saying it.

I was watching this clip again the other day and I wondered if any other food could get away with a similar name. Would anyone buy something called, "What Do You Mean This Isn't Meat?!" or "But It Feels Like Cheese!"?

I doubt it.

The Wikipedia page for I Can't believe It's Not Butter has a great list of the imitation knock-offs:

• "Butter It's Not!"
• "Isn't It Butter?"
• "What, Not Butter!"
• "Could it be Butter?"
• "You'd Butter Believe It"
• "You'd Think It's Butter!"
• "Unbelieveable^[9] [sic] This is not butter"
• "Not Butter But Better"
• "Tastes Like Butter"
• "Is it Butter?"
• "Utterly Butterly"
• "Better By Far"
• "This is not Butter. It's Butterific!"

This is probably my new favorite list as far as lists go. But also, I think these names could be used for almost any product and still be not false.