all very well
1
6.7
- idiom
- UK
:
está muy bien
- While it's all very well to encourage teamwork, some members still prefer to work alone.
you would say, well, it's all very well. Sometimes it seems to work that through facing challenges and problems we grow.
- you would say, well, it's all very well. Sometimes it seems to work that through facing challenges and problems we grow.
Examples
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It's all very well to say use other stuff like jQuery, or download it from GitHub, etc., but my skills just aren't good enough for much of this.
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That's all very well for people with a lot of skills and confidence in web design and coding who can switch between programs, understand the coding, etc., but for people like me, it's not much help.
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you would say, well, it's all very well. Sometimes it seems to work that through facing challenges and problems we grow.
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Now you might think though, look, it's all very well, this sort of emotional literacy, but why not just learn more facts?
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Jo: I know that the first time -- it's all very well in rehearsal to be talking about playing a maid, but --
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While it is all very well and good that the TSA is making an effort to create financial incentives.
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It is all very well to use math to decide what the climate sensitivity can be or cannot be based on Earth's climate history; however, if you want direct measurements of CO2's effect on climate, I know a way you can get the very most direct measurements there are.
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Your gainsaying seems to be driven by basic closed-mindedness to empirical evidence and blind repetition of inappropriate and simplistic mantras like "all very well till the sun goes behind a cloud" or till "the sun goes down."
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It's all very well to propose new ideas, but we need practical solutions to implement them.
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That all very well sounds very well in theory, but I'm not sure it will work in practice.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The constituents 'very' + 'well' plausibly convey 'acceptable' and 'all' suggests entirety, so a learner could infer a basic sense of something being 'quite acceptable'. However, the conventional concessive/pragmatic meaning — that it may be acceptable in theory but is insufficient in practice (the implicit 'but') — is not fully predictable from the parts and depends on discourse usage, making it partially but not wholly transparent.
Etymology
All very well may come from the simple image of saying all is very well, meaning everything looks fine on the surface. So people use all very well to say something may be 'in theory' fine but is 'not enough in practice'.