- Who doesn't like me? - Everyone! / No one!

Question

Consider this exchange between two people that I saw on TV: A has told B that none of B's colleagues like B. B comes back with a question and gets an answer:

B: Who doesn't like me?
A: Everyone!

Why did A say everyone? Should A not have said no one instead? Is it not the same as the choice between these sentences? :

Everyone doesn't like you.
No one likes you.

Interestingly enough, I found 48 hits for "everyone doesn't" in COCA, for instance:

• Everyone does n't care.
  _{(If it were me, I would've said Not everyone cares or No one cares, depending on what I'd meant to say.)}
• Everyone doesn't have that luxury of another room.
  ^(...)
• Tell me again why everyone doesn't just network into this meeting?
  ^(...)

Now, what's the story here? Are both options possible?

Answer 1

This is a good example of the difficulty that English has in dealing with negative sentences. In this case, the question

Who doesn't like me?

is asking us to identify the group of people who dislike the questioner. As you suggest

No one likes you.

would probably be the clearest answer, but the difficulty is that a single word response of nobody doesn't work. Here that would mean that

Nobody doesn't like you. (So everyone must like you.)

It's clumsy to say

Everyone doesn't like you.

and that's not something you'd hear in normal conversation, except as an intentionally awkward construction used to mock the person asking the question. It is best avoided in anything remotely formal and honestly in informal conversation as well. Especially for a person learning English, the assumption would likely be that you had made a mistake rather than that you were being clever.

That said, there is one case in which Everybody doesn't and nobody doesn't have become famous as part of an advertisement:

"Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
Later shortened to a jingle, "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."