I have a question. Gary was expressing something about the doctor’s waiting room.
He said that when he’s been there, “Everyones not masked.”
So if he goes in to the waiting room and he is the tenth person there, how many people (other than Gary) are wearing a mask?
Update =========
I interpreted his statement to mean there were 0 people masked. I said I only remembered one non-masked person, he said, YES EVERYBODY WAS NOT MASKED. When I pointed out the ambiguity, he said WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO ARGUE WITH ME. One hour later he claimed he said “Not everyone was masked,” and did not appreciate it when i pointed to the documentation I’d made pre-post.
5 responses to “UPDATED; Syntax Word Problem”
0-1? I would assume “everyone’s not masked” is roughly synonymous with “no one is masked” which is colloquially apparently approximately equivalent with anywhere between actually-zero and 10% or so of the people there wearing masks properly, from anecdotal examples (with the percentage depending on what the person was expecting, largely – if someone expects *literally everyone* to be correctly wearing masks, then the percentage that results in a statement “no one was wearing masks!” can be higher than if they’re not expecting many people to be masked).
That said, “everyone” might only be considering the people waiting, with staff being categorized differently and in a different masking-percentage bucket, again depending on assumptions.
Or it might be a Missouri thing. Or a wherever-Gary-comes-from thing. 🙂
(“not everyone’s masked” would mean that one or more people were not wearing a mask, though, in my version of English, which is… geographically mixed. Maybe that’s what he was aiming for?)
(I mean: “everyone is not happy with this change” = “no one is happy with this change” vs. “not everyone is happy with this change” = “some people are not happy with this change”? I think?)
What he SAID is that zero of nine were masked. But this is Gary, so what he MEANT could be anything.
KC – after i wrote down what he’d said, he came back and tried to claim he had said “not everyone was masked,” but I had made note if his exact words.
Silk – Yes. just like tonight when he referred to a $30,000 raise as a $60,000 raise. Because all numbrs are doubled.