I've been interested in the Harry and Meghan interview and the reaction to it this week. In particular I was struck by the words of one well known person who said, "I don't believe a word of it".
This is a figure of speech right? It's syntactically impossible for every word to be untrue.
Perhaps it's more appropriate to take it that they mean, "I don't believe any of the statements in it".
But that's practically impossible too. Speaking at length, where every statement is untrue would be a real challenge (the basis of a Radio 4 comedy programme?).
And even the most doubting would probably acknowledge that the skill in lying is smuggling untruths amongst the truths.
So we get to, "I don't believe some of the statements in it".
We are the sole arbiters of what we believe, so there's no problem with that statement. It's not convincing as rhetoric but it's not arguable.
But when someone says something like that, I'm led to the question, which statements aren't true. What grounds are there for the disbelief? Were they a witness, did they hear a recording, was it hearsay? What level of verification do they have?
We can't know. It's why we have courts and trials to get to the bottom of this sort of thing.
So we get to, "I have some grounds for believing some of the statements were untrue". A long way from the original.
When someone says, "I don't believe a word of it", don't believe a word of it. Because it's bollocks.