A man is killed in the Ookestan War every 2 minutes 17 seconds. When 17 more seconds go by yeet another man is killed in the Ookestan War.
A man is not killed in the Ookestan War every 2 minutes 17 seconds. Joe Johnson is a man. He most definitely does not get killed all over again every 2 minutes and 17 seconds.
You should be able to come up with some massively different reads of the imporance of a murderer in this town being found.
If I am preaching to the choir, I take it you agree that everyday language is NOT a simple matter of "where the word ‘NOT’ precedes a phrase it takes the opposite of the meaning of the phrase without the ‘NOT’ in front of it – ?
Without reading the answer yet, I interpret it to mean “every widget is not a gadget” therefore there are no widgets that are gadgets and so widgets and gadgets are mutually exclusive groups.
Without having read any of the other answers (to avoid bias), I read it as “Not every widget is a gadget.” I recognize that it is easy to read the logical form of the sentence as “Every X is such that if X is a widget, X is not a gadget”, but colloquially, I read it as, “It is not the case such that for every X, if X is a widget then X is a gadget.”
First up, I agree that if someone was to say “every widget isn’t a gadget” they’d probably mean “not all widgets are gadgets,” but your examples don’t demonstrate your point at all. “All” is not the same as “Every”.
Bessy is a cow. Carl is a cow.
Every cow is not named Carl.
True or false?
False. There is a cow named Carl, therefore the statement that every cow is not named Carl is false. For it to be true, every cow would have to have a name other than Carl.
I see it on a par as “I ain’t got nothing to say.” You mean “I have got nothing to say” but the literal interpretation of your words without context is that you don’t have nothing to say, therefore you have something to say. However I’d recognise the meaning.
Yes - despite being opposites (at least in my particular reading of them), they’re both false. If you’re arguing that one would have to be true if the other is false, that’s just a false dichotomy.
I will agree that the form “Every X is not Y” is generally poor phrasing. However, when it appears, unless there are qualifiers (“Except as mentioned above, every fee is not refundable”), folks using the phrase generally mean it as equivalent to “Not every X is Y.” It behooves them to phrase it more clearly most of the time, but it also behooves you to understand what they mean.
The debate between common usage and literal meaning reminds me of a SNL sketch. Ed Asner played a retiring nuclear power plant operator, whose final advice to the team was, “Don’t forget, and this is critical! You can’t use too much cooling water.” It ended with a mushroom cloud, as I recall.
Clearly if we’ve got examples going back to Shakespeare, the construction already existed in the language before the divergence of American and British variants - but I think it’s just fallen out of use here in the UK - only really cropping up in poetic forms and in old literature - I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use it in common speech.
Which is probably why I perceive it as a universal statement - I’m only familiar (in everyday terms) with statements starting ‘All widgets…’ when they’re universals.
I’m not really sure what distinction you were making here - if the whole set has the property of being widgets, then it follows that all of the members are widgets (or else it wasn’t the whole set after all).
I’d consider the source. From someone trained to parse statements logically, e.g. a programmer, definitely, “All widgets are nongadgets”. From someone else, probably “Some widgets are nongadgets”.
Unfortunately to ask for clarification won’t help much, because the first group will reply that all has been said, and the second group won’t understand the question. (In my experience, the hardest thing in obtaining clarification of an ambiguous statement is to make the other person understand it is ambiguous).
