The in this Sentence is Not Misplaced

But the “not” may be.

I have a long-term beef with a particular phrasing that is specifically American but which seems to be bleeding into English of other nations.  The most recent variant I have seen was from Australia’s ABC in an article on the misuse of the term “fascist”.  The author, Matthew Sharpe, is an Associate Professor at Deakin University in Burwood, Melbourne so he should know better, but I do note that he is affiliated with Continental Philosophy.  I also note that his About page has him as “membver” of an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (here are the specific grant details).

Anyway, the offending phrase is at the end of the first section, repeated twice, first as “… all movements that aim to do this are not fascist”.  Or rather I should say was, clearly someone was even more incensed than I was (or had more time on their hands) and complained about the obvious miswording leading to a correction.  This is excellent news, but the rot does seem to be starting and something should be done about it.

What I intend to do, as far as this noble cause goes, is analyse the language a little, apply a smidgen of logic and common sense and demonstrate why Matthew Sharpe’s original wording was wrong (and thus why the ABC was correct in correcting it).

Let’s break his phrase down a little:

(all) (movements that aim to do this) (are) (not) (fascist)

which can be thought of as conforming with the standard pattern.

quantifier subject existential-verb adverb adjective

Yes, “not” is an adverb meaning that it modifies a verb.  As an adverb “not” can take on a bit of an existential role, for example this is one of the characteristics that one might list against a cat: “not dog”.  Note that the term “not dog”, when applied to a cat, is effectively the same as saying “there is something X, such that … X is not a dog” – so there is an implied existential verb (ie is).  We can apply the same logic to other categories, like adjectives and adverbs: “beautiful”, “high”, “slow”, “(made of) gold”, “the same”, “fascist”, and “all”.

I don’t really want to address Sharpe’s argument about what is and what is not fascist here.  I only want to address his poor grammar (before it was corrected), so let’s use another version, a phrase that I have used before and will undoubtably use again (although I may be forced to change the subject if the rot continues):

(all) (Americans) (are) (not) (intelligent)

Compare this to another possible statement that we could make about Americans:

(all) (Americans) (are) (very) (friendly)

In the first instance, the poor speaker when asked “Who is intelligent?” could reply with “Not all Americans” or maybe “Some Americans” or even “A lot of Americans”.  And this is basically my point.  When you formulate a sentence, you generally indicate who (or what) you are talking about, then you indicate what sort of thing they are doing and then indicate in what way they are doing it (or to whom they are doing it).

This is what is happening in the second sentence, as clarification will draw out when asked “Who is friendly?”  “Americans, all of them are very friendly”.

Let’s use brackets differently to make this even more obvious:

(all Americans) (are) (not intelligent)

(all Americans) (are) (very friendly)

In the latter sentence you could easily imagine that we could drop the “all” and still maintain the meaning.  If you drop the “all” from the first sentence, then you keep the real meaning (Americans are unintelligent), but the meaning that the poor speaker is trying to get at is lost (“Americans are not intelligent” cannot be reasonably understood as meaning the same as “Not all Americans are intelligent”).

As I noted above, when you seek clarification, even the poor speaker may instinctively group the “not” with the correct word, ie “all”.  Note further that it’s not just about putting “not” where it should be, it’s also about picking the right word.  The poor speaker could fix the sentence by merely substituting “all” with “some”:

(some Americans) (are) (not intelligent)

This is clearly a true statement, there’s a spread of intelligence in all societies and there are going to be unintelligent people in each of them (although not all of them will get elected to high office).  What is totally bizarre is that some people might believe that you can have two sentences, one that starts with “some” and another that starts with “all” but which are otherwise precisely the same and nevertheless mean precisely the same thing.  Consider:

Some people think that that is totally bizarre

All people think that that is totally bizarre

See, it simply doesn’t work.

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Finally, some (but not all) might point out that no less than Shakespeare wrote “All that glisters is not gold”.  This is true.  Rather it is true that Shakespeare wrote that but, in fact, some things that glister (or, in the modern vernacular, glitter) are gold.  So he’s wrong, or he’s just being poetic.  He also wrote “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm from an anointed King”, which is also wrong since he really meant “Not even all the water in the rough rude sea”, otherwise he’d be implying that some of the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed King, just not all of it, for example there’s a bit over near France that’s hopeless at the job.  In this instance, he could even have said “All the water in the rough rude sea/Cannot wash the balm from an anointed King”.

Shakespeare was basically hopeless, except for the fact that he was writing 400 years ago, when the language was a bit different (if thou doth recall, thou flibbertigibbet), often in iambic pentameter which demands a different sort of grammar than an opinion piece about what does and what does not constitute fascism.

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In the original phrasing Matthew Sharpe was saying that none of the movements that aimed to do what he was talking about (taking over the state in part by destroying liberal institutions like an independent media and individual rights) were fascist.  This is a dangerous sort of thing to be saying, even accidentally.  Sure, not all of them are fascist, but some of them most certainly are.

Grammar nazi out.