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xkcd again, but now on linguists and their weird habits (mander.xyz)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I feel slightly offended. Because it's true.

(Alt text: "Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out.")

xkcd source

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If I were to rely on my "guts":

I fell in a hole - I was already inside the hole, and I fell.
I fell down a hole - I fell completely, I reached the ground of that hole.
I fell into a hole - I was outside the hole, and my fall made me enter the hole. That's probably how I'd use it, in a typical situation.

However I'm not a native speaker, and my L1 is rather relaxed when it comes to what prepositions convey. And from a quick websearch, Google lists 3.3M occurrences for "fell in a hole", 2.2M occurrences for "fell into a hole" and 820k for "fell down a hole"; that hints for me that, by default, speakers would use "in a hole" here, unlike I would.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I could say "I fell in a hole" to mean either case (I was in or out of the hole beforehand), but for "I fell into a hole" I would only use it when starting outside the hole. (native speaker)

Like on the one hand it could mean "I fell [while I was] in the hole"

But it could also mean "I fell [and then I was] in the hole"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I am a native speaker, and I do take my word choices very seriously - often to the point of pausing during conversations to find the exact phrasing which will convey the shade of meaning I am looking to convey. I wrote fiction for a while, and it was always extremely important to me to get phrasing right.

I agree with you completely. While I would interpret all of those phrases as equivalent (based on context) if they were to come from someone else, I would tend to use them in exactly the ways you suggest.