I can recall hearing more than a few times in my life the old maxim, “No good deed ever goes unpunished.” For most of my adult life I was never really sure what it meant. At face value it’s a negative statement meant to convey a truth more emphatically, which, as I would come to learn later, is a literary device called a litotes (lie-TOE-deez). They’re very common in English (for example: “She’s not an unattractive woman.”) Yet this knowledge served only to classify the phrase—when I tried to render it in the positive (“Every good deed is punished…”), it ...