All Lawyers Are Not Liars: True or False?

If you answered “True,” would you also say that all pizzas are not edible, or that all editors are not sticklers, or that all peeves are not justified?

As you know very well, you would be wrong in every case. It’s not true that all lawyers are not liars, because some lawyers are liars. To accurately express what you probably believe to be true, you should write “Not all lawyers are liars”—although the first construction has become so commonplace that even though I’m an editor, and even though not all editors are sticklers, I feel a little stickler-y making a fuss over it.

And yet this particular gaffe is worth some fuss. Some seemingly similar errors—like the misplacing of only—are easier to forgive because everyone knows what you mean by them. I only* make adjustments to only if its position in the sentence helps to clarify a critical difference in meaning: She only fears robots when they’re programmed to sing off key. (Does she fear nothing else, including robots with perfect pitch?)

But “all are not” in place of “not all are” almost guarantees that the reader will stumble. We take “all X” to mean “every single X.” All humans are mortal. So when you start a sentence with “All lawyers,” a reader is justified in expecting that you have something to say that is true of all lawyers. And if it turns out to be that they are “not liars,” you’ve just confounded things.

Language and writing are already rife with comparatively harmless word confusions: flammable vs. inflammable, regardless vs. irregardless. But “all are not” and “not all are” are such bald statements of logic and clarity that to confuse them is to mess with our most fundamental notions of being.

Let’s not.

*QED.

Photo of posed actor by Kevin McShane.