Question
Updated on
24 Mar 2023
- English (US)
-
Japanese
Question about English (US)
What is the difference between itās all but ā¦. and itās nothing but ā¦. ?Feel free to just provide example sentences.
What is the difference between itās all but ā¦. and itās nothing but ā¦. ?Feel free to just provide example sentences.
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- English (US)
'It's all but X' means it's everything except for X; it's not X. 'It's nothing but X' means it's only X and nothing else.
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- English (US)
That seems logical, but Iāve just heard from news that the city in Ukraine is all be abandoned. Is it abandoned, or is it not abandoned?
- English (US)
- English (US)
@GCinvu This might be a situation where context is necessary to figure out what it means.
A similar situation happens with the phrase 'I couldn't care less'. It means that the speaker doesn't care at all, and in literal terms the phrase 'I could care less' should mean the opposite. Even so, many native speakers use 'I could care less' and 'I couldn't care less' interchangeably, and so in many situations 'I could care less' means the opposite of what its literal meaning suggests.
If the context suggests the city is abandoned, either the author is using 'all but' to mean 'nothing but', or the author is interpreting 'all but' as 'almost but not entirely'- it's as abandoned as it can be without actually being fully abandoned.
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- English (US)
I think he meant āitās all abandonedā but itās not natural to say āitās nothing but abandonedā.
- English (US)
@GCinvu Well 'all but' never means 'all', but it can mean 'almost'. Personally, I'd avoid the confusion and just say that it's abandoned, but the author probably wanted to be more specific.
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- English (US)
@GCinvu Yep, but just to say what I said before in a less confusing way: 'all but' is a contronym (also known as an auto-antonym among other things), a word/phrase with two meanings that are (nearly) the opposite of each other. It can mean 'almost entirely' or it can mean 'everything except for', and the only way to tell is through context.
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- English (US)
I understand that, since āitās all but abandonedā literally means āeverything else has happened except abandonedā, so it mean itās not abandoned. But the news shows itās abandoned everywhere, thatās the confusion. Other example I can think of: āitās nothing but netā means it only hit the net. āItās all but netā means it did not hit the net.
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