I’m sorry if this seems dumb. I tend to take things literally and “mutual” and “exclusive” seem to be antonyms but mutually exclusive is a term used a lot and it confuses the crap out of me. I’m a native English speaker also.
Does it mean that the two things CAN exist together? I feel like my brain does gymnastics trying to understand the term; I’m not a dumb person but this term just totally eludes me!
Please don’t attack me, just trying to not feel stupid.
In: 49
First, let me say that the other answers here are great. They give you a good idea of what the words are trying to say.
I kinda get what you mean, though. The implication of *mutually* exclusive is that you could somehow have a situation where **A** implies ***not* B**, but that **B** would still somehow allow **A**.
This doesn’t work, because if you have **B**, there is no way you can have **A**, as that would introduce a contradiction. Imagine that you have **B** and **A**…well, the first rule says that if you have **A**, you cannot have **B**: and there is our contradiction.
It can make your head swim a bit.
I agree with you that it’s a bit of an unfortunate phrase. Ultimately, we are throwing the “mutually” in there to try to clear up the possible confusion if we were to just use “exclusive”. Does this mean they only happen together? Or that they exclude each other? Making it “mutually exclusive” tries to clear this up. It works, as long as you don’t try to read too much into “mutually”.
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