30602
Reading through my first short story by 秋田滋訳 and have gone ahead with the
story and had relatively few problems with it, but I'm a bit confused by the
first line:

> [新聞]{しんぶん}をひろげてみて[次]{つぎ}のような[三面記事]{さんめんきじ}が[出]{で}ていない[日]{ひ}はほとんどあるまい。

I get we're talking about 'try to spread the newspaper' amd 'the following
human interest story' but I'm really not sure what 出ていない日はほとんどあるまい。means.
出ていない日 seems like it would be 'the day it's not coming out' or something along
those lines, but otherwise I'm stuck. I understand enough that the rest of the
story makes sense, but I can't hazard a guess of the precise meaning.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-21T19:05:40.277
30599
2016-01-21T19:27:50.357
7927
question
negation relative-clauses
Confused by apparent double-negative in literary context
「新聞をひろげ(る)」 simply means "open the newspaper" (to look at it); then 「記事が出(る)」
means for an article to "appear". This use of 出る is extremely common
colloquially, so for example "to be on tv" is 「テレビに出る」.

So the sentence simply means that "Hardly a day went by that I would open the
newspaper and not find this sort of gossip story".
CC BY-SA 3.0
2016-01-21T19:27:50.357
30602
2016-01-21T19:27:50.357
7717
30599
answer