I really didn't say everything I said

Here's a nice article by linguist Ben Zimmer about Yogi-isms.

"I have said about that what I have said about that"

Belgian federal State Secretary for Asylum Policy and Migration Theo Francken reacted today curtly to suggestions that our country might accept more than 250 (mainly Syrian) asylum seekers a day:

Ik heb daarover gezegd wat ik daarover heb gezegd.

'I have said about that what I have said about that' 

This is a clear tautology, unlike Wooster's "When we Wooster's are adamant, we are -- well, adamant". We interpret tautologies not just as trivial truisms. As they are so obviously true and hence provide nothing in terms of information that we could not already have known by ourselves, our task as listeners is to find out why they are uttered at all. In this case, it is: 'I stand by what I said' -- precisely the tautological interpretation of Wooster's utterance (which, let me repeat, I don't think was initially intended to come out as such a tautology).

Tautologies are not paradoxes but they are linked to them in a straightforward way: we only have to negate them to end up with a paradox, or definitely a contradiction (I still don't know whether I should make a distinction between paradox and contradiction):

Ik heb daarover niet gezegd wat ik daarover gezegd heb.

'I haven't said about that what I have said about that' 

This is why Wooster's utterance is not a tautology. We can negate it without the result being a paradox:

When we Woosters are adamant, we are not adamant.

With a small amount of effort, we can make sense of this as conveying the following:

'When we Woosters are adamant, it is possible for us to change our mind about being adamant'

This is not pure nonsense. You can be adamant about things and know that you'll never change your mind, but you can also be adamant about things temporarily -- say for a week or so -- and then evaluate your comportment to see whether you can relax your being adamant about them.

Awkward adamance

What ho! Have you ever read anything by P.G. Wodehouse? You haven't? By Jove, you should! It's immensely funny. Here's a typical exchange between Bertie Wooster, one of London's idle rich, and his intellectually superior manservant Jeeves, who tends to disapprove of Wooster's vestimentary taste:

‘… Soft silk shirts with evening costume are not worn, sir.’

‘Jeeves,’ I said, looking the blighter diametrically in the centre of the eyeball, ‘they’re dashed well going to be. I may as well tell you now that I have ordered a dozen of those shirtings from Peabody and Simms, and it’s no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant.’
‘If I might-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said, raising my hand, ‘argument is useless. Nobody has a greater respect than I have for your judgement in socks, in ties, and – I will go farther – in spats; but when it comes to evening shirts your nerve seems to fail you. You have no vision. You are prejudiced and reactionary. Hidebound is the word that suggests itself. It may interest you to learn that when I was at Le Touquet the Prince of Wales buzzed into the Casino one night with soft silk shirt complete.’
‘His Royal Highness, sir, may permit himself a certain licence which in your own case-’
‘No, Jeeves,’ I said firmly, ‘it’s no use. When we Woosters are adamant, we are – well, adamant, if you know what I mean.’
‘Very good, sir.’

(Quotation quoted from https://pechorinsjournal.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/, where incidentally I also spotted another instance of that 'complete denial' use of except that I discussed earlier:

And that’s it, with that template and the odd minor variation you could in theory write most of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, except you couldn’t at all because none of that matters in the slightest.)

Just like when I just wrote that I quoted a quotation, in the above dialogue Wooster makes use of this wonderful mechanism known as recursion to say that he's adamant about being adamant. Only, in Wooster's case, it's not clear whether there's any usefulness in adding a meta-level of adamance. What does it mean for someone to be unshakable in their determination to be unshakable in their determination? Wooster seems to be aware of how little his utterance makes sense, or least of how awkward his formulation is, witness his addition of "if you know what I mean". Perhaps, he intends it as a tautology, that is, a truism like "War is war" or "Boys will be boys" (about which the linguist Wierzbicka has written extensively). What he means to say then is this: "If we Woosters say no, we say no" or simply "No is no". I doubt that this is the interpretation Wooster had in mind when he started the sentence. I think the humorous effect lies in the reader seeing how Wooster probably wanted to utter a sentence of the following general structure:

When we Woosters [verb phrase], we are adamant. (Meaning: 'When we Woosters [verb phrase], we are determined not to change our mind about it')

e.g. When we Woosters have decided to take a course of action, we are adamant. ('When we Woosters have decided to take a course of action, we will carry it through')

e.g. When we Woosters have principles, we are adamant. ('When we Woosters have principles, we are unyielding and faithful to them')

The structure above, with adamant at the end, could have functioned as an effective rhetorical means to say, 'I won't change my mind about [my opinion or course of action mentioned in the preceding discourse], so that's the end of the discussion.' Note how Wooster, earlier in the dialogue, said "it's no good looking like that, because I am jolly well adamant", again with the word adamant at the end. Wooster ruins the potential firmness of the above structure by using are adamant too early in the sentence, making the second occurrence of it sound silly and superfluous.

By the way, have you noticed how adamant is one of those adjectives that necessarily takes a complement? Even when it's not used with about X, we know that it applies to some opinion, principle or purpose that we have to retrieve from the context. It's one of those words that requires contextual 'saturation', to use a term by the French philosopher Fançois Recanati. So, you can't just say, out of the blue, I'm adamant, without expanding on it, while it's perfectly okay to say I'm hungry.

Afterthought: So, what's the point of this post? How is it relevant to paradox? There's nothing paradoxical about Wooster's sentence, is there? No, there isn't, but it's undeniably the case that many paradoxes in the family of Liar Paradoxes involve the use of a meta-level -- or perhaps, more precisely, the failure to use one. If someone says, "This sentence is a lie," there is no stable ground, no external level from which you can judge the truth of something else. Understanding paradox is understanding how meta-levels work and why some sentences lead to strange loops (e.g., This statement is false) and others don't (e.g., This sentence contains five words).