Not! is a grammatical construction in the English language that became a sarcastic catchphrase in North America in the 1990s. A declarative statement is made, followed by a pause and then an emphatic "not!" is postfixed. The result is a negation of the original declarative statement. Popularized in North America in the 1990s by the Saturday Night Live skit and subsequent movie Wayne's World, it can be found earliest in print in an 1893 Princeton Tiger (March 30) 103: "An Historical Parallel-- Not." Most often used jocularly, but also be used to express annoyance, it was such a popular catch phrase that it was selected as the 1992 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society.
1992 Word of the Year. Impressive
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