"Not everything needs..." is definitely acceptable English, and sounds more-correct to my ears. It would also be fluent to write that sentence as "Some things do not need...".
As a logician, I find the phrasing "Everything does not need..." to make me a bit queasy, and I would prefer if it were regarded as unacceptable.
HOWEVER, it's not unacceptable. For example, a famous aphorism is "all that glisters is not gold" (often diluted, in recent centuries, to "all that glitters is not gold"), which is surely not intended to claim that gold never glitters. So I guess I have to tolerate hearing it the illogical way.
Exactly! English is the only language where I hear such illogical statements. Same goes for the inverted usage of "all but", which imo _should_ mean "everything except for" but seems to mean "almost". I wonder what causes this.
> English is the only language where I hear such illogical statements.
Fear not, the exact same thing happens in other languages. Must be that you just don't hear much, for instance, Swedish: "Allt som glittrar är inte guld." (Should logically be "Inte allt som glittrar är guld", just like in English.)
> Same goes for the inverted usage of "all but", which imo _should_ mean "everything except for" but seems to mean "almost". I wonder what causes this.
That doesn't feel "inverted" at all to me. You just need to interpret the "all" as it must have been intended: "the whole"; "all the way there" -- then "all but" quite logically becomes "not quite the whole way there".
Like, if a piece of software was almost, but not quite completely, finished ==> "the software was all (the way to) but (not quite arrived at) finished."
Maybe it helps to see the similarity with this related form: Almost all the bugs were fixed, but one was left ==> "All but one of the bugs were fixed." (The bug-collective was all but vanquished. :-)
"Not everything needs..." is definitely acceptable English, and sounds more-correct to my ears. It would also be fluent to write that sentence as "Some things do not need...".
As a logician, I find the phrasing "Everything does not need..." to make me a bit queasy, and I would prefer if it were regarded as unacceptable.
HOWEVER, it's not unacceptable. For example, a famous aphorism is "all that glisters is not gold" (often diluted, in recent centuries, to "all that glitters is not gold"), which is surely not intended to claim that gold never glitters. So I guess I have to tolerate hearing it the illogical way.