All too easy
"History is about people. Historians who don’t get that tend to be the ones who struggle to get anyone to care about their work. Ultimately you have to care about the people you encounter through your research, if you want anyone else to. But it is all too easy to start caring about figures from the past if you find yourself reading the documents that record their lives while sitting in what was once their kitchen. Or having just walked up a staircase, holding the wooden banister that their hands once gripped. To read their letters from within the house in which they were written, or to hold in your hands their death certificates, while standing on their front steps or in their bedroom, is a strangely intimate experience. A close encounter between historian and subject." (The Guardian.)
Does "all too easy" mean "very/extremely easy" or "quite simply easier" in the passage above?
Top answer
It means "very easy", essentially, but this is an unusual and, I would say, off-putting use. "all too easy to ~" is normally used to talk about negative things that you should try to avoid doing. In this case it seems to be used about a desirable thing.
- It means "very easy", essentially, but this is an unusual and, I would say, off-putting use.
- "all too easy to ~" is normally used to talk about negative things that you should try to avoid doing.
- In this case it seems to be used about a desirable thing.
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It means "very easy", essentially, but this is an unusual and, I would say, off-putting use. "all too easy to ~" is normally used to talk about negative things that you should try to avoid doing. In this case it seems to be used about a desirable thing.
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