I appreciate the different perspective . I ' ve just spent a bit of time considering this , because no one would interpret your sentences as ' at no point in the future ', but a lot of people seem to agree with me that this is what the original sentence implies . You have shown that ' never ' can work to mean ' in no case ', yet this is not how most people read it . I ' d say that ' in no case ' is a secondary meaning of ' never ', and that you need an additional pointer to indicate that this is what you mean . In your examples , these pointers are a present tense or the pointers I find or You ' ll notice . All of these phrases help to point the reader towards to correct interpretation of the sentence . Without these , as in the original post , the reader simply falls back to the main definition of ' never ', meaning at no point in time . The grammar may be defensible , but without this context it is unreasonable to expect the reader to understand correctly . Pretty cool , though . Never really noticed the distinction before . Thanks for enlightening me a bit today .