“All but”

Posted on Thu 01 April 2021 in en • 2 min read

Versione in italiano

The phrase all X but means all X except.
E.G., “The Skittles were all colors but blue” means “The Skittles were of all colors except blue”.

The phrase all but often means almost, other times it means all except, and it’s very confusing.1
E.G., “The Skittles I ate were all but blue” means “The Skittles I ate were almost blue”.
While “The Skittles I ate were all but the blue” means “The Skittles were of all colors except blue”.

If one knows both meanings, there are few ambiguous usages. An intuitive way to identify the correct meaning is to replace all but with almost2 or all except and evaluate which one makes more sense.

I knew only one of the meanings: all except. I don’t know how many things I’ve read and misinterpreted.
It took some time for me to note that some usages didn’t make sense given the context. The very first times I presumed the writer was confused. Then I understood that the mistaken one wasn’t the writer but this very reader.

Is there a way to update the bad ideas I got after misreading all those all but? I don’t think so, I’ll have to live with that extra pinch of self doubt, a bit of self injected humility.

Fortunately I managed to avoid the same issue with cougar, and egregious Netflix & Chill which has at least four different meanings.

Beware of false friends!3

  1. Oxford’s Lexico lists both definitions. ↩

  2. english.stackexchange.com lists some tests and a good explaination. ↩

  3. I dislike it when writers writing about writing embed examples of the aforementioned writing in their writing. I all but avoided doing the same. ↩

english false friends