Well from my view this side of the pond nobody would say “all of them are not armed” to convey the idea that some but not all of them are carrying arms, so context is arguably required to clarify intention. The common usage most English speakers are familiar with is surely “not all of them are armed” which needs no context to be understood?
Anyway, looks like it’s a common enough American usage so ignorance fought.
FWIW I would tend to say “none of them are armed” in normal speech, but you get some nitpicking grammar pedants on these boards so wanted to be on the safe side
I agree with you entirely. I had begun to think that I might be the only person in the world annoyed by that phrase, preferring" the “not all x are y” version. Like some others here, I often have to remember “all that glisters is not gold” in order to force myself to accept it, albeit grudgingly.
Sadly it doesn’t really work, because the next step is me muttering to myself “I don’t care if Bill Shakespeare did write it. I still don’t like it. And didn’t Shakespeare have clocks striking in Julius Caesar, and a silly line in Macbeth saying “he has killed me, Mother”? Grumble grumble, grumble”. I should probably give up talking to myself, because it is never the holliest of conversations.
The difference is all about where you pause or break the sentence.
Consider the difference:
“All X are not” + “Y” means that not every single X is Y. e.g Not every person is armed.
“All X are” + “not Y” matches up with the OP’s understanding. Every person is unarmed.
I think that both are correct readings and the reader needs context to understand what the writer wanted. However, the use of “All X are not” makes more sense to me than “All X are.” The second interpretation seems more forced and unnatural to everyday speech. It is easier to say “Every X is” for that usage.
If making the reader “work harder than required” is an example of sloppy writing, then pretty much every classic piece of literature is sloppy writing.
And I don’t see why it’s logically wrong. All of them are not armed, however, some of them are armed. If you want to say otherwise, you say “None of them are armed” or “All of them are unarmed.”
ETA: Or to take it Wolverine’s way: There’s a difference in accent: “All of them are not armed.” vs “All of them are not armed.”
Oh, and anymore and any more are two different words for different cases, like anyway and any way. “I’m not making any more cookies.” vs. “She make cookies anymore.” or “Anymore, she can’t get help.”
I am British and I think “All of them are not armed,” to convey that only some of them are armed is perfectly fine, and not particularly ambiguous.*
Indeed, I would not use that form to say that nobody in some group is armed, both because it is an awkward way to say that and because for me it most immediately evokes the meaning intended by Fuzzy Wombats. I would say either “None of them are armed,” or “All of them are unarmed.”
*Actually, I think that in speech it would be disambiguated by intonation. If the all and the not were heavily stressed then it would mean that none were armed. If it were said with a falling inflection and no stress on the not it would mean that only some of them were armed. To me, the latter, without the rather deliberate stressing, is the most natural way to read it when written.
This highlights an interesting quirk of language, as “all of them are not armed” seems to be causing confusion, yet “all of them are unarmed” is cited as unambiguous. So, is “unarmed” defined as “not armed”, or not?
That’s not quite the issue though, it’s not the compound word that bugs me. It seems perfectly natural to me to use “any more” in a “these days” type context for negative statements, “He’s not able work any more”; “She doesn’t make cookies any more”. There it’s acting as a synonym for “any longer”. It seems to be in the last few years that it has begun to be used for positive statements too.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it happened, I understand that language is constantly changing and evolving and I know that I use plenty of idioms that don’t make literal sense. I suppose it just stands out to me because I’ve seen it spread without actually using it within my peer group.
“Unarmed” = “not armed”… can it be defined any other way?
“All of them are unarmed”
“All of them are not armed”
I honestly can’t see how they can mean different things.
“All of them are unarmed”
“Not all of them are armed”
Same words but totally different meaning (IMO, obviously).
There’s a good reason I put this in IMHO as clearly some people have no problem with this usage, but to me it just grates horribly… in my humble opinion.
There are words where the ‘un~’ prefix doesn’t render quite the same meaning as prefixing with ‘not’ - usually where ‘un’ indicates that some state has been reversed (as opposed to the state just never having happened). Consider:
Dead. ‘They are not dead’ vs ‘They are undead’
Tied. ‘The boat’s mooring rope was not tied’ vs ‘the boat’s mooring rope was untied’
In the case of armed, I suppose some people might interpret ‘unarmed’ to mean ‘doesn’t own a weapon’ and ‘not armed’ to mean ‘not carrying a weapon, right now’
In which case the sentance would mean “All of them are not carrying a weapon”, which to my ears still implies that no guns are present? Rather than “Not all of them are carrying a weapon” vs “None of them are carrying a weapon”.
Part of the reason Shakespeare opted for “All that glisters is not gold” is presumably that it fits his chosen metre better than alternatives?
In which case this would support the view that either it’s incorrect gramatically or that it’s highlighting the point that “if it glitters / glisters it’s not gold”.
I agree in this case, and to my British ears, ‘all are not armed’ sounds like a universal.
Maybe, but I think it’s more likely that the usage was simply more common in English at that time - English subsequently split into UK and American variants, and a different subset of things fell out of common usage on either side (‘gotten’ is another example of this)
I think the Wiki link is just explaining it for anyone who happens to stumble over the usage, as we are wont to do,.
Since Chaucer said very much the same thing before Shakespeare, it looks like maybe Shakespeare was just using an alread-common idiom of his day. The linked article gives a number of other early uses of the construction (and notes that there appear no ‘not all…’ counterexamples back that far)
Tis just the way we used to speak. Brits largely stopped doing it - Americans continued.
I think it’s just a language ambiguity in English. (Some languages may avoid this, but might be more ambiguous in other ways. It would be interesting to learn about language-dependent ambiguity; unfortunately we mustn’t pose the question to linguists who are, without doubt, the Most Pedantic and Self-Righteous of any scientific specialty.)
An even simpler example of ambiguity is “You can not smoke.” It means smoking is forbidden but parses as meaning that not-smoking is allowed. Even Thai (usually far more ambiguous than English) avoids that problem, since it allows “not” to be placed either before or after the “can.”
Are you a linguist, Johanna? If so, since there’s very little relation between your statement and mine, I’ll take yours as another datapoint in my favor.
How is she being self-righteous and pedantic? You (ignorantly, and without provocation) insulted all the linguists on this board.
It’s variation, man. It doesn’t jibe with my idiolect, either, but it is well-established usage. (Cite: Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc.)
-Jaj, Logician.
Just out of curiosity, you do make a big-assed caveat stating that formal Logic isn’t the same as ordinary English, right? I mean, as soon as we hit the seemingly simple word “OR” we’ve already diverged from ordinary English. I’m a mathematician by trade, and I’ve always wondered how others deal with this.
All X are not Y to mean X and Y are mutually exclusive is somewhat of a colloquialism, acceptable in everyday usage. This is what I first thought it always meant. I didn’t encounter the meaning that Y may be a subset of X until being exposed to academic or formal discourse.
