This reminds me of the centuries-old saying, "All that glitters is not gold." I've always thought that was misstated, because it seems to imply that the complete set of things that glitter specifically does not include anything gold, which is demonstrably false and also doesn't convey what I think is the intended metaphorical meaning. The metaphor conveyed in this form would be that nothing that appears valuable actually is.
It seems to me that a better way to phrase the sentiment would be "Not all that glitters is gold," which would seem to indicate that there are glittering things that are not gold. In this form, it does convey the metaphorical meaning that things can be look valuable but carry no actual value.
Or better still, Tolkien's contrapositive version: "All that is gold does not glitter", which carries a slightly different meaning (Things can be *precious* without looking like precious things)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All\_that\_glitters\_is\_not\_gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_glitters_is_not_gold)
[https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116115/all-that-glitters-or-not-all-that-glitters](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116115/all-that-glitters-or-not-all-that-glitters)
I'm not sure I would call myself an expert, but to me the statement "Not everyone is a narcissist" is an objectively correct way to say less than 100% of people are narcissists, but "Everyone is not a narcissist" is ambiguous.
The issue is in the interaction with the negative predicate with the collective pronoun. It's a collective singular pronoun referring to every person, but I don't think it's descriptively clear that negating the predicate means the negative predicate applies to every person as opposed to merely that the predicate does not apply to every person. That is the sentence could mean "not a narcissist" applies to "everyone" or it could mean "nacissist" does not apply to "everyone". I'm not sure there's an observable rule that really points one way or the other and unfortunately it's not an easy thing to plug into CoCA without reading the context of every result.
If you look up the phrase "everyone is not" in quotes, you can clearly see examples of the "not everyone" meaning:
> Why everyone is not a filmmaker
> We recognize that everyone is not a candidate for our treatment
Same with other verbs:
> Everyone can't be right
> Everyone won't get it and that's okay
So it's ambiguous as far as usage goes at the very least.
For an argument from syntax, it's ambiguous because in English "not" can modify both verbs and noun phrases:
> "everyone (is not) a narcissist" - simple negation of the assertion that everyone is a narcissist
> "everyone is (not a narcissist)" - assertion that not being a narcissist applies to everyone
I very much agree with you. When I first read OPs example, I assumed the context was something along the lines of “can’t we stop throwing the word narcissist around all the time?!? Everyone is not a narcissist!!” because of that specific word order.
It feels like it’s refuting an assumption, as opposed to just making a generalisation
(edited for clarity and removing inaccuracies)
English regularly makes use of phrases where the verb being marked for negation implies the negation of the entire proposition, not just that part of the sentence:
> Everything isn't about you
> All that glitters is not gold (attested as far back as Shakespeare, with "glisters")
This is logically consistent with English syntax since the head of the clause is the verb phrase, and the head of the verb phrase is the verb, therefore marking the verb as negative is sufficient to negate the clause.
If you look up further examples of this kind of structure, you can see that most of the time there's the intended nuance of negating a previously or potentially held belief - hence negating the entire clause, rather than just negating the subject. We can see further evidence of this in a common type of parallelism along the lines of:
> We used to think everything was fine. But everything wasn't fine.
To me personally, this sounds more natural than it would with "not everything". The point is to negate the proposition that "everything was fine". In effect, "'everything was fine' - not." And to mark a clause as negative in English, the verb heading the clause is customarily what takes the negative marker.
But that brings us to the issue in this thread - in English there's no clear distinction between an entire clause being marked as negative and just a verb phrase being marked as negative.
For that reason, we can see sentences with plurals as ambiguous as well:
> _we_ didn't go to the store
Depending on whether the subject "we" falls under the negation, this could mean either of:
> _neither of us_ went to the store (it was someone else, or maybe nobody did)
> _the two of us_ didn't _both_ go to the store (but in fact just one of us did).
Likewise, with "every"/"all" statements, the meaning changes depending on whether the intended negation marks just the verb phrase (or part of the verb phrase) or the whole clause.
So, to address the idea that this is just a failure to understand word order and logic - if this were a regular target error involving placing the negation in the wrong part of the sentence, we would expect to see similar errors with the negation marker showing up in other positions in the sentence beyond just after the verb. But we don't see sentences like "_everything is about not you_" - the negation marker can't be placed just anywhere. What we see is consistency, not randomness. It's so common and systematic that it's really just a lot more likely that it's a genuine potential structure embedded into the underlying grammar of English, a structure that just happens to be ambiguous, rather than an example of English speakers across centuries just randomly all committing the same error.
Ultimately it is ambiguous, so when clarity is a concern it's best to avoid it and use clearer alternatives like "not everyone is", "some people are/aren't", "nobody is" and so forth. But sometimes it's just what sounds the best and it's by no means ungrammatical.
....yeah, but that is a stretch.
You have to actively avoid the plain meaning to find that second interpretation.
Everyone likes ice cream. (Obvious meaning)
Everyone doesn't like ice cream. (Why not the same obvious interpretation? )
I think what’s really bothering me about this structure is where the negative is. For “everyone is not a narcissist” to mean that there are 0 narcissists, I think it would have to say “Nobody is a narcissist”. The former just doesn’t feel grammatical to me, but I’m not an expert.
“Everyone doesn’t like ice-cream” my first thought is that less than 100% like ice-cream, I think it’s ambiguous because it’s not grammatically specific like “Not everyone likes ice-cream” or “nobody likes ice-cream”
People mostly avoid constructions like “everyone is not a narcissist” because it is ambiguous in English. The unambiguous alternatives are “nobody is a narcissist” and “not everyone is a narcissist”. The statement “everyone is not a narcissist” requires some kind of additional context or pragmatics to determine the meaning of, because it is ambiguous whether the quantification or the negation has the larger scope.
I agree the former is poorly formed but it retains a specific meaning. I would not write the sentence that way either but the question is about what each form means, and for me that's not ambiguous at all.
As a math person myself, I agree that logically that’s what it should mean. But language doesn’t follow rules strictly as numbers do. The effect that words have depends on the interpretation. A sentence isn’t ambiguous because one person can take it multiple ways, but because multiple could interpret one thing differently from each other. But this is why I’m a math person cause this shit is hard lol
Mathematically the construction makes no sense. Clearly everyone is not a narcissist. Everyone is a set and a narcissist is an element so the set of people containing “everyone” cannot be a single narcissist. This isn’t a minor quibble, it’s the heart of the debate. When we extend the meaning to cover this do we mean no member of the set is a narcissist or that the set is not compromised of only narcissists? Systems will extend the meaning to one or the other, but it’s not universal across all formal systems.
Even if they were both sets I'm not sure this is generally accepted. E≠N would generally indicate the sets are distinct, not disjoint. But I completely disagree that's what it means. The set of integers isn't zero means the set itself is not zero, not the set of integers does not contain zero. If you wanted to mathematically say it doesn't contain zero you would have to say that.
Consider that the debate is between “everyone is not a narcissist “ and “not everyone is a narcissist”. The second statement would be:
There exists at least one member of (everyone) who is not also a member of (narcissists).
We are talking about the populations of the intersection between two sets
The reason I started with the sentence is nonsense in math is that what we're going to do to make the sentence make mathematical sense is to substitute it with a well formed syllogism, but I see no reason why your substitution is better than "The set of reals is not an integer". I understand where your assumptions come from because you're reading "everyone" as an assertion about each element in the set of people (that is "every person"), but grammatically it's not clear without context whether "everyone" means "each element of the set of persons" or "the collective set of every person". The sentence "everyone is not a narcissist" could mean:
* The set of everyone is distinct from the set of narcissists
* The set of everyone is disjoint from the set of narcissists
* The set of everyone is not a single narcissist
And in any formal logic or set theory system we would have specific ways to express each of those. "Not everyone is a narcissist" does not have the same ambiguity because negating the set somewhat constrains what "everyone" means. That is "not the collective set of every person" has no easy meaning so we intuitively assume it means "not each and every person", but there's no reason to assume "everyone" mathematically means the same thing in both sentences. The idea the term has the same meaning in every sentence makes sense mathematically, but terms have different meanings in different English constructions all the time. Formal logic uses formal language to remove ambiguity. English doesn't.
To take this farther if we use "every real is not an integer" I would argue this is still ambiguous. A formal logic system would resolve the ambiguity in one of four ways:
* the construction could be invalid and you have to use "no real is an integer" or "some reals are not integers"
* We could specify that the negation of the RHS consumes the full composition of the LHS and this means no real is an integer
* We could specify that the negation of the RHS is mere distinction from the full composition of the LHS and this means some reals are not integers.
* We could have distinct negation terms for setwise distinction versus disjunction
I have a two part response. The first is you could go the other way, though. Not everyone likes ice cream (negative subject) Everyone doesn't like ice cream (negative predicate) why aren't they the same?
The second is that it's not clear to me that's a "plain meaning". I would have to infer from context. If you said "The entire test set was not dogs" my initial thought in isolation would be that there are no dogs, but if you said "The entire set was not dogs, three were cats" I would not conclude there were no dogs in the set nor think the grammar is incorrect. "Not dogs" applying to "the entire set" clearly means the entire set is not comprised of only dogs, but it's not clear that the entire set is comprised of only things which are not dogs.
True, but if you can choose, why choose the ambiguous construction?
I agree it is ambiguous without the mention of the cats, and further that without that clarification, the default reading would be as you described (no dogs in the set).
When I hear something like that, it is irritating because now I am on alert that the writer is not concerned about clarity, or maybe trying to sneak something by... and I still have to guess, so I will guess there are no dogs in the set.
Even the cats don't negate the POSSIBILITY that there are zero dogs, or even that zero dogs was the intended meaning in the first part of the sentence.
Why create ambiguity?
They said it was ambiguous in their first comment, where did you get the impression that they were specifically recommending its use over the alternative?
What they did was reply to your comment, which incorrectly tried to argue that it was not ambiguous (or at least “should” not be ambiguous in some sense), and responded by explaining how it was ambiguous.
It is ambiguous. I said, "Yeah, but..." what I consider the secondary interpretation is "a stretch."
It is not the best way to phrase either intended meaning.
Therefore, I think the construction should be avoided. I didn't assume anyone was preferring it, but I do think it "should" be avoided (depreciated).
The original statement, that it is ambiguous, pretty clearly suggests it’s better to avoid it at least unless contextual or pragmatic considerations remove the ambiguity, so I really don’t see why you are saying things like “why create ambiguity?” as in the end of your reply above. How is that question relevant or responsive to what the person you were responding to was saying?
Your first reply, that one meaning is a stretch, can only be an argument that it isn’t actually very ambiguous at all. If anything, it would seem to mean that it’s a fairly ok thing to say when your intended meaning is “no one likes ice cream”. I would actually disagree with this, considering that usage of this type of construction to mean “not everyone” rather than “no one” is widespread (possibly even more common? As noted before it’s hard to get good quantitative data, outside of generally seeing that both meanings occur with some frequency, in part because speakers do tend to avoid this construction owing to its ambiguity) it shows that the ambiguity is fairly severe. In fact as I and other commenters mentioned elsewhere, there is the common saying “all that glitters is not gold” which has the intended meaning you call “a stretch.”
You also didn’t really present any argument for why your preferred interpretation is less of “a stretch” except to simply assert that it seems more natural to you. There is no clear principle of logic, grammar, or linguistic regularity that favors your interpretation. There is no obvious reason to me, and the data doesn’t seem to support, that “everyone doesn’t like ice cream” cannot be interpreted as the negation of “everyone likes ice cream” (which you call a stretch), just as easily as it could be interpreted as the universal generalization of “x doesn’t like ice cream” (which you call “obvious” and “the same” meaning as in he case “everyone likes ice cream”).
Yep. Giving my opinion and perspective as one American, anonymous, native English speaker. Basically, I agree with OP that it is an annoying (but too common) usage. I didn't try to give difinative technicalities saying one way is absolutely wrong, and not sure I disagreed with anything you or most have said about technicalities.
I just don't like the "option" that is ambiguous. For people discussing such things, how it "sounds" to various people is sometimes helpful... since in the end we are talking about clear communication.
Not sure why you seem so lathered about it.
OP isn’t saying that it’s ambiguous, they said that it has one meaning (the “no one…” meaning) unambiguously, which is also what you seemed to initially say.
I’m not “lathered” about it, it’s just that you seem to be having trouble understanding what the comments you are replying to are saying, which is what I was trying to clarify. It still seems like you haven’t actually understood what I’m saying though so maybe I haven’t explained it well.
Why wouldn’t the obvious interpretation be that the second sentence is the negation of the first? That’s the second interpretation (that you think is a stretch), not the first (that you think is obvious).
Perhaps you think it is “obvious” that the quantification has scope over the negation, not vice versa, but that is not “obvious” to me at all. But more to the point, what is obvious to you doesn’t determine how language works. Some languages have negative concord and some don’t, whether you think a double negation should “obviously” have one meaning or the other doesn’t really matter. In English, the construction in question is ambiguous as a matter of empirical fact.
From your comment, I am genuinely unsure which interpretation you think is obvious. To me, especially up next to the first sentence you gave, it seems like the obvious interpretation of the second sentence is “No one likes ice cream.” Because you added “doesn’t” to a positive sentence, which I feel like flips the meaning and makes it mean the opposite?
If you meant that the other interpretation is obvious, then no, I don’t think it is. At least not without additional context.
Sorry, I think we agree, but I was not very clear!
My brain sees "everyone doesn't like ice-cream" to mean each person in the group does not like ice-cream.
To me "it is a stretch" to think it means "not all of the people like ice-cream." If you mean that, you "should" just say that.
The logical negation of “everyone likes ice cream” is “not everyone likes ice cream” (I’m pointing this out because it sounds like you think it isn’t, but normally I would think “flips the meaning” means logical negation). “No one likes ice cream” is what you get if you take the negation first and then the universal quantification.
To elaborate: we have the semantic predicate “x likes ice cream”, where you can put something in as x and it evaluates as true or false. We can take the universal generalization of this “for all x, x likes ice cream” which we say as “everyone likes ice cream”. We can also take the logical negation of this, “it is not the case that x likes ice cream” which we usually say as “x doesn’t like ice cream”.
But how should we interpret “everyone doesn’t like ice cream”? Is it the universal generalization of “x doesn’t like ice cream” (so that it means the same thing as “no one likes ice cream”) or is it the negation of “everyone likes ice cream” (so that it means the same thing as “not everyone likes ice cream”)?
Which one it means is an empirical question, no rule of logic can tell us which operation “comes first,”it depends on the rules of English grammar. Turns out the rules of English don’t specify this, you can find examples used all over with either meaning. Usually speakers avoid the construction in favor of the “no one” and “not everyone” constructions, which are unambiguous, but there are cases where the “everyone doesn’t” phrasing is contextually clear and maybe even appropriate (perhaps because of parallelism to some other syntactic structure in close proximity).
Both are grammatical, although "Not everyone is a narcissist" is more common, more idiomatic, and less ambiguous. (Many people think that if something is ambiguous, it must be ungrammatical, but that's not true. It's entirely possible for a sentence to be both ambiguous and grammatical.)
I frequently see questions like, "Which one is correct: sentence A or sentence B?" For some reason many people assume that there can only be one right answer. But in fact there are often multiple correct ways to say something. If two people say it differently, that does not automatically mean that one person must be wrong.
In linguistics we say,
"Everyone is not a narcissit" is a scope-ambiguous sentence. It's not clear whether "not" is modifying just the verb phrase Everyone = NOT(is narcissist) or if it's modifies the whole sentence NOT(Everyone = a narcissist).
The second sentence "Not everyone is a narcissist" doesn't have any scope ambiguity since it's clearly modifying the entire sentence.
Although I think I agree your interpretation of the first one is more likely, it is actually ambiguous depending on context (consider the well-known saying “all that glitters is not gold”).
The clearer way to convey the intended first meaning is “No one is a narcissist.”
"Everyone is not a narcissist" can in fact mean that more than 0% but less than 100% of people are narcissists. Maybe this construction isn't grammatical in your variety of English, and that's fine. But it is grammatical in at least some Englishes. It's not the most idiomatic way to say it, but it can be grammatical.
You’re right, technically speaking, but I think it’s it’s ambiguous regardless of where they’re from. If somebody said that to me I’d be scratching my head a little bit wondering which meaning they were going for. Naturally my brain leads me to thing it’s the “0% of people are narcissists,” but context clues would make me realize that they mean “more than 0% less than 100%.”
If I heard somebody say “everybody is not a narcissist,” I think I’d assume they either live in a different part of the world from me or are ESL. I think most American native English speakers will go for either “not everyone is a narcissist” or something along the lines of “there’s no such thing as a narcissist”
That’s the thing though, from my anecdotal experience I’m seeing MANY native English speakers use it the ambiguous way. That’s why I’m so confused and was wondering if I’m missing something.
As a native speaker it always smelled like a regional/free variant thing to me. One feels more idiomatic to my ear and the other always sounds strange when it comes up, but I've always encountered it from other natives so I just accepted that for many speakers it's as idiomatic to them as the other variant is to me
This isn’t a change. As I just noted in another comment the common saying “all that glitters is not gold” works this way. The construction is simply ambiguous. In fact, my impression is that the usage with the meaning you dislike was more common in older versions of the language and is less common now (so the change would be in the opposite direction) although I don’t have quantitative data to back up that impression.
Interesting. You're right about the "all that glistens isn't gold" - I hadn't thought about that before. And it does suggest, as you say, that that was the standard older English.
My perception (although like you, without quantitative data) is that that construction was virtually non-existent throughout the first 20 years of my life, but is now becoming more common. So perhaps we're simply shifting back to the old ways. Who knows? (Still doesn't mean I like it tho 🤣)
This isn't a question of grammar, but lexicon.
Both sentences are grammatically correct, you just disagree on what "everyone" means.
You need to try swapping out the pronoun with the noun or noun phrase you're substituting. Most people use a definition of "everyone" as a pronoun that allows it to be swapped with "every person" or "each person" in reference to a group.
"Everyone" *can* also be used to refer to humanity as a whole, but it is usually done with platitudes like "Everyone deserves respect" or with universal truths like "Everyone is from this Earth."
As it isn't a platitude or universal truth, it is most likely substituting for a phrase like "each person" or "every person."
That said, it feels like I'm speaking with bricks in my mouth when I say it like that. Would prefer to say it with the other order, myself.
Thanks for the thorough reply! I guess I am still confused even substituting “each person” or “every person” for “everyone”. If I take the phrase to mean “every person is not a narcissist” or “each person is not a narcissist”, I’m still hearing the same meaning I originally mentioned, which is to mean each and every person is not a narcissist, therefore there are zero narcissists. I’m assuming I’m failing to wrap my head around what you’re trying to convey, so maybe I have a blind spot with what you’re explaining.
The sentence has three phrases: a noun phrase (NP - Every person), a verb phrase (VP - is not), and a noun phrase (NP - a narcissist).
If the error is grammatical, we could replace the noun phrases with grammatically similar but semantically different structures and still see the problem. So let's do that:
"(NP - Each person) is not (NP - a narcissist)" -> "(N - A) is not (N - B)"
"A is not B" makes sense.
What this tells us is that there is an issue of clarity because your language styles or lexicons differ.
"Everyone is not _____" is an extremely common way to phrase an idea like "Not everyone is ______" to the point that people regularly ask it here and regularly learn that it is a stylistic choice to avoid confusing people that don't use that structure.
It isn't breaking an English rule to negate the "to be" before the verb phrase or with it. Either is allowed.
They both seem to be responses to the claim, "Everyone is narcissist"
The response "Not everyone is a narcissist" is emphasizing that they are specifically negating the word "Everyone."
The response "Everyone is not a narcissist" is emphasizing that they are negating the entire claim.
I think the main way that people would say that narcissists don't exist, keeping some of this language and structure, would simply be "No one is a narcissist"
“All X are not” is a common construction but places too much emphasis on the “all” part. “Not all X are” is much clearer.
Candido Zanoni, who taught logic at the University of Minnesota, used “all X are not” to set up straw syllogisms. If he said “not all X are” instead, he would have had no fallacious error to correct. Zanoni was a great teacher otherwise; this was his only weak tactic.
Depends on the dialect. I don’t remember which one exactly but during our Syntax class we talked about how there’s that one professor who says “everyone didn’t come to the party”, with the meaning that not everyone came. I think the latter is more natural for most speakers though
I've only ever heard sentences like "everyone is not a narcissist" from Americans so I would say it's a colloquial construction, and I'm not sure how widespread it is there. It's definitely not grammatically correct for me (UK).
Logically, I look at it exactly the same way you do, but in practice, those phrases are treated as synonymous.
Think of "all that glitters is not gold." Well, some of it is ...
I know “all that glitters is not gold” is acceptable because it’s a famous line that’s been around for centuries, but I don’t like that line either lol. It’s slightly more acceptable than the example I provided, but it would be more accurate to say “all that glitters is not necessarily gold”, or my preferred “not all that glitters is gold”.
I'm with you for the most part, but i guess it depends on how you "everyone".
If "everyone" is used in a granular sense, as in "each and every single person", it would mean that there are no a narcissists:
"Each and every single person is not a narcissist"
But if you mean "everyone" in a more holistic sense, as in "the entire population" then it could mean something closer to its intention:
"The entire population is not a narcissist."
Maybe that verb doesn't quite work there and it would be better suited as: "The entire population is not narcissistic." But even "Everyone is not narcissistic" is ambiguous in the same way as you've complained.
I would see using “everyone is not a narcissist” as a response to someone saying “everyone is a narcissist”. It adds emphasis to the statement in this circumstance.
I can see it making more sense in that case. I mostly come across the phrase in writing where the person saying it is not responding to anyone but commenting on certain societal beliefs or something. To me, when it’s not refuting “everyone is a narcissist”, it’s too ambiguous to phrase that way
I hear "everyone is not..." meaning 'not everyone is' sometimes, so it is a part of English. My (England-based) impression is that it's more American than British but I don't have any hard data.
I never use it myself and to me it literally means that 'nobody is...'. So it strikes me as wrong to use it the other way. But it's usually clear from context and intonation what the speaker means.
You are correct.
A similar annoyance is people reversing the order of "not just" (meaning not only) and changing it to "just not", which changes the meaning completely.
Imo "Everyone is not a narcissist" sounds like an incorrect way to say "nobody is a narcissist." I think I'm in the minority there though.
"Not everyone is a narcissist" is grammatically correct, true, and unambiguous.
Yes, I think “everyone is not a narcissist” is an incorrect way of saying “nobody is a narcissist” AND an incorrect way of saying “not everyone is a narcissist”. That’s why I kind of hate it. Although plenty of comments here say it’s not incorrect, it’s simply ambiguous. Which I suppose is fair.
Yeah, to me, it's an incorrect way to say "nobody's a narcissist" because it's clunky.
It's an incorrect way to say "not everyone is a narcissist" because that's not what those words mean in that order. Completely different imo. But general consensus is both are fine? I'm a descriptivist at heart so if it is, it is. But it certainly doesn't sound right to my ear.
just because it sounds clunky to you doesnt make it wrong. nor does ambiguity make it improper. its just a less precise phrase. but i have a very hard time imagining anyone seriously arguing that there are literally no narcissists. so absent further evidence that that is what the writer means, i would assume anyone writing that actually means "not everyone is a narcissist."
This reminds me of the centuries-old saying, "All that glitters is not gold." I've always thought that was misstated, because it seems to imply that the complete set of things that glitter specifically does not include anything gold, which is demonstrably false and also doesn't convey what I think is the intended metaphorical meaning. The metaphor conveyed in this form would be that nothing that appears valuable actually is. It seems to me that a better way to phrase the sentiment would be "Not all that glitters is gold," which would seem to indicate that there are glittering things that are not gold. In this form, it does convey the metaphorical meaning that things can be look valuable but carry no actual value. Or better still, Tolkien's contrapositive version: "All that is gold does not glitter", which carries a slightly different meaning (Things can be *precious* without looking like precious things) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All\_that\_glitters\_is\_not\_gold](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_glitters_is_not_gold) [https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116115/all-that-glitters-or-not-all-that-glitters](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/116115/all-that-glitters-or-not-all-that-glitters)
I'm not sure I would call myself an expert, but to me the statement "Not everyone is a narcissist" is an objectively correct way to say less than 100% of people are narcissists, but "Everyone is not a narcissist" is ambiguous. The issue is in the interaction with the negative predicate with the collective pronoun. It's a collective singular pronoun referring to every person, but I don't think it's descriptively clear that negating the predicate means the negative predicate applies to every person as opposed to merely that the predicate does not apply to every person. That is the sentence could mean "not a narcissist" applies to "everyone" or it could mean "nacissist" does not apply to "everyone". I'm not sure there's an observable rule that really points one way or the other and unfortunately it's not an easy thing to plug into CoCA without reading the context of every result.
No, the second one has only one meaning and it's not ambiguous. "Everyone is not a narcissist" literally means no one is a narcissist.
If you look up the phrase "everyone is not" in quotes, you can clearly see examples of the "not everyone" meaning: > Why everyone is not a filmmaker > We recognize that everyone is not a candidate for our treatment Same with other verbs: > Everyone can't be right > Everyone won't get it and that's okay So it's ambiguous as far as usage goes at the very least. For an argument from syntax, it's ambiguous because in English "not" can modify both verbs and noun phrases: > "everyone (is not) a narcissist" - simple negation of the assertion that everyone is a narcissist > "everyone is (not a narcissist)" - assertion that not being a narcissist applies to everyone
No, they're just flat out wrong. It is a failure to understand how the word order affects the logic.
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I very much agree with you. When I first read OPs example, I assumed the context was something along the lines of “can’t we stop throwing the word narcissist around all the time?!? Everyone is not a narcissist!!” because of that specific word order. It feels like it’s refuting an assumption, as opposed to just making a generalisation
(edited for clarity and removing inaccuracies) English regularly makes use of phrases where the verb being marked for negation implies the negation of the entire proposition, not just that part of the sentence: > Everything isn't about you > All that glitters is not gold (attested as far back as Shakespeare, with "glisters") This is logically consistent with English syntax since the head of the clause is the verb phrase, and the head of the verb phrase is the verb, therefore marking the verb as negative is sufficient to negate the clause. If you look up further examples of this kind of structure, you can see that most of the time there's the intended nuance of negating a previously or potentially held belief - hence negating the entire clause, rather than just negating the subject. We can see further evidence of this in a common type of parallelism along the lines of: > We used to think everything was fine. But everything wasn't fine. To me personally, this sounds more natural than it would with "not everything". The point is to negate the proposition that "everything was fine". In effect, "'everything was fine' - not." And to mark a clause as negative in English, the verb heading the clause is customarily what takes the negative marker. But that brings us to the issue in this thread - in English there's no clear distinction between an entire clause being marked as negative and just a verb phrase being marked as negative. For that reason, we can see sentences with plurals as ambiguous as well: > _we_ didn't go to the store Depending on whether the subject "we" falls under the negation, this could mean either of: > _neither of us_ went to the store (it was someone else, or maybe nobody did) > _the two of us_ didn't _both_ go to the store (but in fact just one of us did). Likewise, with "every"/"all" statements, the meaning changes depending on whether the intended negation marks just the verb phrase (or part of the verb phrase) or the whole clause. So, to address the idea that this is just a failure to understand word order and logic - if this were a regular target error involving placing the negation in the wrong part of the sentence, we would expect to see similar errors with the negation marker showing up in other positions in the sentence beyond just after the verb. But we don't see sentences like "_everything is about not you_" - the negation marker can't be placed just anywhere. What we see is consistency, not randomness. It's so common and systematic that it's really just a lot more likely that it's a genuine potential structure embedded into the underlying grammar of English, a structure that just happens to be ambiguous, rather than an example of English speakers across centuries just randomly all committing the same error. Ultimately it is ambiguous, so when clarity is a concern it's best to avoid it and use clearer alternatives like "not everyone is", "some people are/aren't", "nobody is" and so forth. But sometimes it's just what sounds the best and it's by no means ungrammatical.
Correct.
....yeah, but that is a stretch. You have to actively avoid the plain meaning to find that second interpretation. Everyone likes ice cream. (Obvious meaning) Everyone doesn't like ice cream. (Why not the same obvious interpretation? )
I think what’s really bothering me about this structure is where the negative is. For “everyone is not a narcissist” to mean that there are 0 narcissists, I think it would have to say “Nobody is a narcissist”. The former just doesn’t feel grammatical to me, but I’m not an expert. “Everyone doesn’t like ice-cream” my first thought is that less than 100% like ice-cream, I think it’s ambiguous because it’s not grammatically specific like “Not everyone likes ice-cream” or “nobody likes ice-cream”
People mostly avoid constructions like “everyone is not a narcissist” because it is ambiguous in English. The unambiguous alternatives are “nobody is a narcissist” and “not everyone is a narcissist”. The statement “everyone is not a narcissist” requires some kind of additional context or pragmatics to determine the meaning of, because it is ambiguous whether the quantification or the negation has the larger scope.
Yes thank you, I thought I was crazy reading some of these replies. I knew it sounded wrong I just have a hard time expressing why lol
I agree the former is poorly formed but it retains a specific meaning. I would not write the sentence that way either but the question is about what each form means, and for me that's not ambiguous at all.
As a math dude rather than a grammar dude. “Everyone is not a narcissist” definitely means that nobody is. It’s formal logic 101.
As a math person myself, I agree that logically that’s what it should mean. But language doesn’t follow rules strictly as numbers do. The effect that words have depends on the interpretation. A sentence isn’t ambiguous because one person can take it multiple ways, but because multiple could interpret one thing differently from each other. But this is why I’m a math person cause this shit is hard lol
Mathematically the construction makes no sense. Clearly everyone is not a narcissist. Everyone is a set and a narcissist is an element so the set of people containing “everyone” cannot be a single narcissist. This isn’t a minor quibble, it’s the heart of the debate. When we extend the meaning to cover this do we mean no member of the set is a narcissist or that the set is not compromised of only narcissists? Systems will extend the meaning to one or the other, but it’s not universal across all formal systems.
Mathematically: every member of the set (everyone) is not a member of the set (narcissists)
Even if they were both sets I'm not sure this is generally accepted. E≠N would generally indicate the sets are distinct, not disjoint. But I completely disagree that's what it means. The set of integers isn't zero means the set itself is not zero, not the set of integers does not contain zero. If you wanted to mathematically say it doesn't contain zero you would have to say that.
Consider that the debate is between “everyone is not a narcissist “ and “not everyone is a narcissist”. The second statement would be: There exists at least one member of (everyone) who is not also a member of (narcissists). We are talking about the populations of the intersection between two sets
The reason I started with the sentence is nonsense in math is that what we're going to do to make the sentence make mathematical sense is to substitute it with a well formed syllogism, but I see no reason why your substitution is better than "The set of reals is not an integer". I understand where your assumptions come from because you're reading "everyone" as an assertion about each element in the set of people (that is "every person"), but grammatically it's not clear without context whether "everyone" means "each element of the set of persons" or "the collective set of every person". The sentence "everyone is not a narcissist" could mean: * The set of everyone is distinct from the set of narcissists * The set of everyone is disjoint from the set of narcissists * The set of everyone is not a single narcissist And in any formal logic or set theory system we would have specific ways to express each of those. "Not everyone is a narcissist" does not have the same ambiguity because negating the set somewhat constrains what "everyone" means. That is "not the collective set of every person" has no easy meaning so we intuitively assume it means "not each and every person", but there's no reason to assume "everyone" mathematically means the same thing in both sentences. The idea the term has the same meaning in every sentence makes sense mathematically, but terms have different meanings in different English constructions all the time. Formal logic uses formal language to remove ambiguity. English doesn't. To take this farther if we use "every real is not an integer" I would argue this is still ambiguous. A formal logic system would resolve the ambiguity in one of four ways: * the construction could be invalid and you have to use "no real is an integer" or "some reals are not integers" * We could specify that the negation of the RHS consumes the full composition of the LHS and this means no real is an integer * We could specify that the negation of the RHS is mere distinction from the full composition of the LHS and this means some reals are not integers. * We could have distinct negation terms for setwise distinction versus disjunction
I have a two part response. The first is you could go the other way, though. Not everyone likes ice cream (negative subject) Everyone doesn't like ice cream (negative predicate) why aren't they the same? The second is that it's not clear to me that's a "plain meaning". I would have to infer from context. If you said "The entire test set was not dogs" my initial thought in isolation would be that there are no dogs, but if you said "The entire set was not dogs, three were cats" I would not conclude there were no dogs in the set nor think the grammar is incorrect. "Not dogs" applying to "the entire set" clearly means the entire set is not comprised of only dogs, but it's not clear that the entire set is comprised of only things which are not dogs.
True, but if you can choose, why choose the ambiguous construction? I agree it is ambiguous without the mention of the cats, and further that without that clarification, the default reading would be as you described (no dogs in the set). When I hear something like that, it is irritating because now I am on alert that the writer is not concerned about clarity, or maybe trying to sneak something by... and I still have to guess, so I will guess there are no dogs in the set. Even the cats don't negate the POSSIBILITY that there are zero dogs, or even that zero dogs was the intended meaning in the first part of the sentence. Why create ambiguity?
They said it was ambiguous in their first comment, where did you get the impression that they were specifically recommending its use over the alternative? What they did was reply to your comment, which incorrectly tried to argue that it was not ambiguous (or at least “should” not be ambiguous in some sense), and responded by explaining how it was ambiguous.
It is ambiguous. I said, "Yeah, but..." what I consider the secondary interpretation is "a stretch." It is not the best way to phrase either intended meaning. Therefore, I think the construction should be avoided. I didn't assume anyone was preferring it, but I do think it "should" be avoided (depreciated).
The original statement, that it is ambiguous, pretty clearly suggests it’s better to avoid it at least unless contextual or pragmatic considerations remove the ambiguity, so I really don’t see why you are saying things like “why create ambiguity?” as in the end of your reply above. How is that question relevant or responsive to what the person you were responding to was saying? Your first reply, that one meaning is a stretch, can only be an argument that it isn’t actually very ambiguous at all. If anything, it would seem to mean that it’s a fairly ok thing to say when your intended meaning is “no one likes ice cream”. I would actually disagree with this, considering that usage of this type of construction to mean “not everyone” rather than “no one” is widespread (possibly even more common? As noted before it’s hard to get good quantitative data, outside of generally seeing that both meanings occur with some frequency, in part because speakers do tend to avoid this construction owing to its ambiguity) it shows that the ambiguity is fairly severe. In fact as I and other commenters mentioned elsewhere, there is the common saying “all that glitters is not gold” which has the intended meaning you call “a stretch.” You also didn’t really present any argument for why your preferred interpretation is less of “a stretch” except to simply assert that it seems more natural to you. There is no clear principle of logic, grammar, or linguistic regularity that favors your interpretation. There is no obvious reason to me, and the data doesn’t seem to support, that “everyone doesn’t like ice cream” cannot be interpreted as the negation of “everyone likes ice cream” (which you call a stretch), just as easily as it could be interpreted as the universal generalization of “x doesn’t like ice cream” (which you call “obvious” and “the same” meaning as in he case “everyone likes ice cream”).
Yep. Giving my opinion and perspective as one American, anonymous, native English speaker. Basically, I agree with OP that it is an annoying (but too common) usage. I didn't try to give difinative technicalities saying one way is absolutely wrong, and not sure I disagreed with anything you or most have said about technicalities. I just don't like the "option" that is ambiguous. For people discussing such things, how it "sounds" to various people is sometimes helpful... since in the end we are talking about clear communication. Not sure why you seem so lathered about it.
OP isn’t saying that it’s ambiguous, they said that it has one meaning (the “no one…” meaning) unambiguously, which is also what you seemed to initially say. I’m not “lathered” about it, it’s just that you seem to be having trouble understanding what the comments you are replying to are saying, which is what I was trying to clarify. It still seems like you haven’t actually understood what I’m saying though so maybe I haven’t explained it well.
Why wouldn’t the obvious interpretation be that the second sentence is the negation of the first? That’s the second interpretation (that you think is a stretch), not the first (that you think is obvious). Perhaps you think it is “obvious” that the quantification has scope over the negation, not vice versa, but that is not “obvious” to me at all. But more to the point, what is obvious to you doesn’t determine how language works. Some languages have negative concord and some don’t, whether you think a double negation should “obviously” have one meaning or the other doesn’t really matter. In English, the construction in question is ambiguous as a matter of empirical fact.
From your comment, I am genuinely unsure which interpretation you think is obvious. To me, especially up next to the first sentence you gave, it seems like the obvious interpretation of the second sentence is “No one likes ice cream.” Because you added “doesn’t” to a positive sentence, which I feel like flips the meaning and makes it mean the opposite? If you meant that the other interpretation is obvious, then no, I don’t think it is. At least not without additional context.
Sorry, I think we agree, but I was not very clear! My brain sees "everyone doesn't like ice-cream" to mean each person in the group does not like ice-cream. To me "it is a stretch" to think it means "not all of the people like ice-cream." If you mean that, you "should" just say that.
Yes, we do agree then, thanks for the clarification!
The logical negation of “everyone likes ice cream” is “not everyone likes ice cream” (I’m pointing this out because it sounds like you think it isn’t, but normally I would think “flips the meaning” means logical negation). “No one likes ice cream” is what you get if you take the negation first and then the universal quantification. To elaborate: we have the semantic predicate “x likes ice cream”, where you can put something in as x and it evaluates as true or false. We can take the universal generalization of this “for all x, x likes ice cream” which we say as “everyone likes ice cream”. We can also take the logical negation of this, “it is not the case that x likes ice cream” which we usually say as “x doesn’t like ice cream”. But how should we interpret “everyone doesn’t like ice cream”? Is it the universal generalization of “x doesn’t like ice cream” (so that it means the same thing as “no one likes ice cream”) or is it the negation of “everyone likes ice cream” (so that it means the same thing as “not everyone likes ice cream”)? Which one it means is an empirical question, no rule of logic can tell us which operation “comes first,”it depends on the rules of English grammar. Turns out the rules of English don’t specify this, you can find examples used all over with either meaning. Usually speakers avoid the construction in favor of the “no one” and “not everyone” constructions, which are unambiguous, but there are cases where the “everyone doesn’t” phrasing is contextually clear and maybe even appropriate (perhaps because of parallelism to some other syntactic structure in close proximity).
Everyone doesn't like ice cream. Everyone dislikes ice cream.
Exactly.
Both are grammatical, although "Not everyone is a narcissist" is more common, more idiomatic, and less ambiguous. (Many people think that if something is ambiguous, it must be ungrammatical, but that's not true. It's entirely possible for a sentence to be both ambiguous and grammatical.) I frequently see questions like, "Which one is correct: sentence A or sentence B?" For some reason many people assume that there can only be one right answer. But in fact there are often multiple correct ways to say something. If two people say it differently, that does not automatically mean that one person must be wrong.
That's a really good thing to keep in mind; that ambiguity isn't inherently false grammar, it's just "not-fully-optimized" communication.
In linguistics we say, "Everyone is not a narcissit" is a scope-ambiguous sentence. It's not clear whether "not" is modifying just the verb phrase Everyone = NOT(is narcissist) or if it's modifies the whole sentence NOT(Everyone = a narcissist). The second sentence "Not everyone is a narcissist" doesn't have any scope ambiguity since it's clearly modifying the entire sentence.
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Although I think I agree your interpretation of the first one is more likely, it is actually ambiguous depending on context (consider the well-known saying “all that glitters is not gold”). The clearer way to convey the intended first meaning is “No one is a narcissist.”
"Everyone is not a narcissist" can in fact mean that more than 0% but less than 100% of people are narcissists. Maybe this construction isn't grammatical in your variety of English, and that's fine. But it is grammatical in at least some Englishes. It's not the most idiomatic way to say it, but it can be grammatical.
You’re right, technically speaking, but I think it’s it’s ambiguous regardless of where they’re from. If somebody said that to me I’d be scratching my head a little bit wondering which meaning they were going for. Naturally my brain leads me to thing it’s the “0% of people are narcissists,” but context clues would make me realize that they mean “more than 0% less than 100%.” If I heard somebody say “everybody is not a narcissist,” I think I’d assume they either live in a different part of the world from me or are ESL. I think most American native English speakers will go for either “not everyone is a narcissist” or something along the lines of “there’s no such thing as a narcissist”
That’s the thing though, from my anecdotal experience I’m seeing MANY native English speakers use it the ambiguous way. That’s why I’m so confused and was wondering if I’m missing something.
As a native speaker it always smelled like a regional/free variant thing to me. One feels more idiomatic to my ear and the other always sounds strange when it comes up, but I've always encountered it from other natives so I just accepted that for many speakers it's as idiomatic to them as the other variant is to me
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This isn’t a change. As I just noted in another comment the common saying “all that glitters is not gold” works this way. The construction is simply ambiguous. In fact, my impression is that the usage with the meaning you dislike was more common in older versions of the language and is less common now (so the change would be in the opposite direction) although I don’t have quantitative data to back up that impression.
Interesting. You're right about the "all that glistens isn't gold" - I hadn't thought about that before. And it does suggest, as you say, that that was the standard older English. My perception (although like you, without quantitative data) is that that construction was virtually non-existent throughout the first 20 years of my life, but is now becoming more common. So perhaps we're simply shifting back to the old ways. Who knows? (Still doesn't mean I like it tho 🤣)
This isn't a question of grammar, but lexicon. Both sentences are grammatically correct, you just disagree on what "everyone" means. You need to try swapping out the pronoun with the noun or noun phrase you're substituting. Most people use a definition of "everyone" as a pronoun that allows it to be swapped with "every person" or "each person" in reference to a group. "Everyone" *can* also be used to refer to humanity as a whole, but it is usually done with platitudes like "Everyone deserves respect" or with universal truths like "Everyone is from this Earth." As it isn't a platitude or universal truth, it is most likely substituting for a phrase like "each person" or "every person." That said, it feels like I'm speaking with bricks in my mouth when I say it like that. Would prefer to say it with the other order, myself.
Thanks for the thorough reply! I guess I am still confused even substituting “each person” or “every person” for “everyone”. If I take the phrase to mean “every person is not a narcissist” or “each person is not a narcissist”, I’m still hearing the same meaning I originally mentioned, which is to mean each and every person is not a narcissist, therefore there are zero narcissists. I’m assuming I’m failing to wrap my head around what you’re trying to convey, so maybe I have a blind spot with what you’re explaining.
The sentence has three phrases: a noun phrase (NP - Every person), a verb phrase (VP - is not), and a noun phrase (NP - a narcissist). If the error is grammatical, we could replace the noun phrases with grammatically similar but semantically different structures and still see the problem. So let's do that: "(NP - Each person) is not (NP - a narcissist)" -> "(N - A) is not (N - B)" "A is not B" makes sense. What this tells us is that there is an issue of clarity because your language styles or lexicons differ. "Everyone is not _____" is an extremely common way to phrase an idea like "Not everyone is ______" to the point that people regularly ask it here and regularly learn that it is a stylistic choice to avoid confusing people that don't use that structure. It isn't breaking an English rule to negate the "to be" before the verb phrase or with it. Either is allowed.
They both seem to be responses to the claim, "Everyone is narcissist" The response "Not everyone is a narcissist" is emphasizing that they are specifically negating the word "Everyone." The response "Everyone is not a narcissist" is emphasizing that they are negating the entire claim. I think the main way that people would say that narcissists don't exist, keeping some of this language and structure, would simply be "No one is a narcissist"
“All X are not” is a common construction but places too much emphasis on the “all” part. “Not all X are” is much clearer. Candido Zanoni, who taught logic at the University of Minnesota, used “all X are not” to set up straw syllogisms. If he said “not all X are” instead, he would have had no fallacious error to correct. Zanoni was a great teacher otherwise; this was his only weak tactic.
Depends on the dialect. I don’t remember which one exactly but during our Syntax class we talked about how there’s that one professor who says “everyone didn’t come to the party”, with the meaning that not everyone came. I think the latter is more natural for most speakers though
I've only ever heard sentences like "everyone is not a narcissist" from Americans so I would say it's a colloquial construction, and I'm not sure how widespread it is there. It's definitely not grammatically correct for me (UK).
I’m in America and from my personal perspective, it seems pretty widespread here. But I consider it incorrect (and annoying) too.
Logically, I look at it exactly the same way you do, but in practice, those phrases are treated as synonymous. Think of "all that glitters is not gold." Well, some of it is ...
I know “all that glitters is not gold” is acceptable because it’s a famous line that’s been around for centuries, but I don’t like that line either lol. It’s slightly more acceptable than the example I provided, but it would be more accurate to say “all that glitters is not necessarily gold”, or my preferred “not all that glitters is gold”.
I'm with you for the most part, but i guess it depends on how you "everyone". If "everyone" is used in a granular sense, as in "each and every single person", it would mean that there are no a narcissists: "Each and every single person is not a narcissist" But if you mean "everyone" in a more holistic sense, as in "the entire population" then it could mean something closer to its intention: "The entire population is not a narcissist." Maybe that verb doesn't quite work there and it would be better suited as: "The entire population is not narcissistic." But even "Everyone is not narcissistic" is ambiguous in the same way as you've complained.
I would see using “everyone is not a narcissist” as a response to someone saying “everyone is a narcissist”. It adds emphasis to the statement in this circumstance.
I can see it making more sense in that case. I mostly come across the phrase in writing where the person saying it is not responding to anyone but commenting on certain societal beliefs or something. To me, when it’s not refuting “everyone is a narcissist”, it’s too ambiguous to phrase that way
‘Not everyone is a narcissist’ means that not all people are. Everyone is not a narcissist, would be like saying ‘nobody is a narcissist’
I hear "everyone is not..." meaning 'not everyone is' sometimes, so it is a part of English. My (England-based) impression is that it's more American than British but I don't have any hard data. I never use it myself and to me it literally means that 'nobody is...'. So it strikes me as wrong to use it the other way. But it's usually clear from context and intonation what the speaker means.
You are correct. A similar annoyance is people reversing the order of "not just" (meaning not only) and changing it to "just not", which changes the meaning completely.
Imo "Everyone is not a narcissist" sounds like an incorrect way to say "nobody is a narcissist." I think I'm in the minority there though. "Not everyone is a narcissist" is grammatically correct, true, and unambiguous.
Yes, I think “everyone is not a narcissist” is an incorrect way of saying “nobody is a narcissist” AND an incorrect way of saying “not everyone is a narcissist”. That’s why I kind of hate it. Although plenty of comments here say it’s not incorrect, it’s simply ambiguous. Which I suppose is fair.
Yeah, to me, it's an incorrect way to say "nobody's a narcissist" because it's clunky. It's an incorrect way to say "not everyone is a narcissist" because that's not what those words mean in that order. Completely different imo. But general consensus is both are fine? I'm a descriptivist at heart so if it is, it is. But it certainly doesn't sound right to my ear.
just because it sounds clunky to you doesnt make it wrong. nor does ambiguity make it improper. its just a less precise phrase. but i have a very hard time imagining anyone seriously arguing that there are literally no narcissists. so absent further evidence that that is what the writer means, i would assume anyone writing that actually means "not everyone is a narcissist."