Where you place key word of negation in sentence matters

Joseph Kinyua, the Chief of Staff and Head of Public Service, at Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi in 2016. PHOTO | NJUGI NGUGI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • There is a semantic difference between all is not well and not all is well. In the first case, of course, nothing at all is working, whereas, in her second, some things are still working tolerably well.

  • In general, then, it is merely that only some things have ground to a halt whereas the whole thing is still functioning, probably tolerably well.

  • It depends, then, on where, in your statement, you have placed the key word of negation, in this example the word “not”.

The headline “All is not well in civil service” in The Standard of May 24 could only mean that everything has gone haywire in Kenya’s civil service. A more careful and more accurate way of putting it would have been: “Not all is well in civil service”. Yet the truth would have remained that, for years, every Kenyan has heard that nothing is doing very well in Nairobi’s corridors of power.

So the question is ineluctable: where exactly is the news in that headline? Depending on where, in your sentence, you place the word not (in order to negate the statement), there is a vast difference in meaning between the expression “All is not well” and the expression “Not all is well”. Both expressions are, of course, legitimate.

The only problem is that they do not mean the same thing and cannot, as our newspapers tend to do, be used interchangeably.

The first is all-inclusive, whereas the second leaves out some examples. In “all is not well”, everything, bar none, has gone haywire. But in “not all is well”, you have no headline news because, as we all know, quite a few things are usually in a state of disrepair in just about every one of Kenya’s governmental department.

In the expression “not all is well”, some parts are in bad conditions. But certain other essential parts are still functioning tolerably well.

EVERYTHING KAPUT

On the other hand, the expression “all is not well” implies that everything is kaput, as a despairing German industrialist might exclaim because nothing at all seems to him to be working properly.

In the second, however, though something has gone wrong somewhere in the whole intricate system, the entire machine can still function.

From the myriad of stories that reach my ears from Kenya’s corridors of power, it appears that something is seriously the matter in that organisation. But, because I have not subjected it to any scientific study of my own, I cannot tell you exactly what it is.

What I do know, though, is that, if “all is not well”, then everything has gone kaput, so that all of us with a stake in it are in “a parlous state” (to borrow a phrase from one of William Shakespeare’s delightful comedies). It depends on where, in your statement, you place the word “not” with which to negate the original statement.

But, clearly, there is a semantic difference between all is not well and not all is well. In the first case, of course, nothing at all is working, whereas, in her second, some things are still working tolerably well. In general, then, it is merely that only some things have ground to a halt whereas the whole thing is still functioning, probably tolerably well.

It depends, then, on where, in your statement, you have placed the key word of negation, in this example the word “not”.