You live only once The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once. The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard." Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style grammar
Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967 A Song by John Mayer www.youtube.com And his wife told his kids he was crazy, And his friends said he'd fail if he tried, But with a will to work hard, And a library card, He took a homemade, fan-blade, one-man submarine ride. The Astronaut Farmer