Thursday, August 22, 2019

grammar - 'all of which' vs. 'any one of which' vs. 'each of which'



1) ... if you tried to compare can't with cannot and can not, all of which are distinct in English, you'd end up ...


2) ... if you tried to compare can't with cannot and can not, any one of which is distinct in English, you'd end up ...


3) ... if you tried to compare can't with cannot and can not, each of which is distinct in English, you'd end up ...



Which one is good English, and why?




Answer



All OP's examples are perfectly good English, though (2) is perhaps a little odd in this exact context. And obviously, in this context, they all mean exactly the same thing.


But there are contexts where they're not so interchangeable (to a considerable extent, deriving trivially from the semantics of the specific words in the various idiomatic forms).





1: More than 10 additional Eocene species are known, all of which are American.



...where both any one of which and each of which would be completely unacceptable to me. Why suggest isolating one out of 10 species when the whole point is that they're all the same ("nationality", at least)?






2: Millions of these brakes have been discarded in unknown states of repair, any one of which could explode in the hands of a curious child.



...where any one of which is by far the best choice, since it accentuates the fact that if even one goes off, that would be pretty bad.





3: The team is then asked three questions, each of which is worth five points.



...where any one of which is a bad choice because it misleadingly isolates a single question (implying the team might only answer one). And all of which are is bad because it could easily be misinterpreted as meaning all three questions are worth five points collectively, in total (if they're all answered correctly).




One similar permutation that OP missed out (and which I personally prefer in this exact context) is...




4: Sometimes it is possible to break down long compounds into single elements of one syllable each, every one of which is distinct in meaning.



...where I honestly can't explain why I prefer every. There's nothing wrong with OP's every or all versions there (though again, any one of which doesn't work because of the unwanted "particularisation").


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