Musings on Words

Jonathan and I have weird conversations, sometimes. They might be about history and anachronisms in a movie, both good and bad; or sentence construction that throws off the meaning and/or flow of a paragraph in a novel; or philosophical reasons why that LOL cat picture just doesn't work. Many of them are a delightful mix of academic and absurd that both stretch the mind and tickle the funny bone. Every now and again we come across a real doozy.

While reminiscing on missions and Nauvoo and such, Jonathan remembered an English class he had taught. One of the students asked what the difference between "some-" and "any-" (somewhere/anywhere, sometime/anytime, someone/anyone, etc.) was. As the teacher, he did the best he could but even a decade later still wasn't satisfied with the answer he'd given. Now, he asked if I could do any better. At the beginning, I stumbled along, just as most of us would. There were a lot of wells and ums involved. I could feel the difference, almost taste it, but just couldn't describe it. I eventually decided that some- has an implied restriction, as if there was an expectation on the asker's part, that simply isn't present when any- is used. Think about walking into a darkened room and hearing a noise--there's a vast difference between the question "Is someone there?" and "Is anyone there?" The former includes the expectation that there is a person in the room making the noise, while in the latter the asker might have already written it off as wind, settling objects, or even a pet.

Have you ever tried to explain something that's barely explainable?