adverbs - "Not once he would" vs. "not once would he"


Not being a native speaker and suffering semantic satiation from overthinking this, I'd like to ask this probably overly simple question.



Not once would he...



uses reversal for negation and means "he wouldn't even once..."



Not once he would...



is litotes for "He would frequently..."


Is that correct or did I mess up? If I did mess up, how to correctly express the two meanings?



Answer



Actually, whether the "not once" construct means "never" or "several times" might depend on the rest of the sentence – not just the order of "he would" or "would he". For example, there's nothing wrong with:



Not once would he strike out, but three times that game.



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