Which one of the sentences below is correct both grammatically and conceptually?
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My teacher said that most of it was correct, with only one exception.
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My teacher said that all of it was correct, with only one exception.
grammaticality-in-contextphrase-choicephrase-usagequantifiers
Which one of the sentences below is correct both grammatically and conceptually?
My teacher said that most of it was correct, with only one exception.
My teacher said that all of it was correct, with only one exception.
Best Answer
Grammatically, I would say that both are correct, depending on the situation.
versus
As you can see, "most" is less than all, but more than half (which is how it gets to be most) whereas "all" is obviously the sum total.
Conceptually, however, you're right: The second one is weird.
How could it all be correct and yet have something wrong?
But if we consider it from this perspective:
Then, yes, we could have it "all" be correct because we had not included the exception within that "all."
What do you think? Does this help?
If you take a look at the example sentence in definition one for the word "exception", it may help make things more clear as well.