And to make it extra confusing there's "X is anything but Y" idiom which basically means what pvinis says.
aaah thats why i get confused. i thought its always one phrase, but its "all but" and "anything but". now i get it.
lets just say this whole confusion is anything but unclear now. it used to be all but impossible to understand what people meant.
Re:Go in Go
by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday May 27, 2015 @01:32PM
(#9612962)
Oh, I didn't realise that either. Now I understand.
Yes.
> whenever i see the "X is all but Y" phrase, it makes sense to me that X is not Y.
It's not "X is not Y", it's "X is all but Y", that is, X is very nearly not Y. "All but impossible" means it's possible, but only barely.