A linguistic pet peeve of mine: people saying “all X are not Y” when what they mean is “not all X are Y”. I’m usually easygoing about language differences, but this one completely changes the meaning of what you’re saying in a way where it isn’t always obvious what you meant. It’s clearly a mistake semantically, and one that’s been getting more and more frequent in recent years, at least online. You can’t (honestly) say things like “all kids don’t like sports” or “all Americans don’t live in urban areas with good service”… (the likes of which I see on Reddit all the time)
Posted by Jessica Smith on .
Filed under Languages and tagged with English.
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