All that Glitters Is Not What? By Jon N. Hall January 10, 2020 The literal takeaway from the old adage “ All that glitters is not gold ” is that gold doesn’t glitter. In case you don’t know, that’s false, gold does in fact glitter. So we’re told that what the adage really means is this – Not all that glitters is gold. In the original form of our adage, “not” modifies “gold.” Therefore, “not” has scope over “gold.” In linguistics, a word’s scope is the part of a statement over which it operates. Some linguists contend that in our adage “not” can also have scope over “All.” This is the position taken by what may be the ne plus ultra of descriptivist grammars, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language . The one reference in the CGEL to our adage is in the middle of page 359 (screengrab below), where the CGEL contends that “All of the meat wasn’t fresh” is akin to our gold adage in that it “is ambiguous with respect to scope. In one interpretation the negative has