Put the lottery on

As you know, I'm a big fan of just listening out for interesting linguistic usages, anything that catches the ear or eye. So recently, when I was gently ridiculed for saying I might put the lottery on, and that 'everyone' says play the lottery, I was intrigued. To me, the way I said it was entirely natural and although I could say it the other way too, I didn't think it was true that 'everyone' says it that way. 

So of course I turned to that immediate arbiter of linguistic conundra, Facebook, and asked my friends to settle the question. The first few that responded agreed that I was weird for saying it that way, which obviously wasn't the response I was hoping for, so I asked for some northerners to chip in. And there it was: an almost categorical divide between people in Northeast England, and everyone else. 

A regional difference that no one has (to my knowledge) noticed before! This is my bread and butter. You're welcome. 

At last, someone has written about Wordle!

I've held off on blogging about Wordle, because everyone else did it, and because I didn't have anything particular to say. People tend to assume that if you're a linguist, you like word games, but I don't think that's any more true for us than for normal people. Some of us do, others don't. I happen to love crosswords (because there is a quiz or a puzzle element) and dislike Scrabble (because I'm not good at anagrams). I do, as it happens, love Wordle. I love logic puzzles like sudoku, and this is basically just a logic puzzle with an added constraint. 

There is, or used to be, a board game called Mastermind which was a pure logic version of Wordle. (If you don't know what Wordle is, by the way, I don't know where you've been. It's what we all spent the early part of 2022 doing.) There, the thing you had to guess was the sequence of coloured pegs. There were only a few colours, and only a sequence of four, so much fewer than the 26 letters and five slots that Wordle involves. And you needed like ten goes to get it, rather than the six that you get with Wordle. The rules were the same: you got told if you'd got one right and in the right place, or right but in the wrong place, or wrong. You weren't told which one, though, which did make it harder in that respect (otherwise it would have been incredibly easy). I loved this game and I'm not sure why I never had my own copy (maybe no one else liked playing it with me, or maybe I never mentioned that I liked it?) but I played it when I was at other people's houses. 

So yes, I do love Wordle, because of the logic puzzle aspect. The word part of it does add something interesting for me, though. I like the constraint it puts on the possible answers. It's not the case, as in Mastermind, that every combination is equally possible. Some just aren't, or are much less likely, and that's due to the rules of either languages in general, or English in particular. So an example of a language-in-general thing is that there are going to be some vowels in the word, and some consonants. An example of an English-in-particular thing is that the last letter is probably an 'e' or a consonant, because we don't have so many words that end in 'a', 'i', 'o' or 'u' (though we do have some, so it's not absolutely ruled out). Another English-in-particular thing is that if you know you've got an 'h' in there somewhere, it's possibly the first letter but if it's not, you've likely also got a 't' for 'th' or a 'g' for 'gh' in there. Not always; ahead would have stumped me in that case. 

I've been paying attention to how I solve them, and I usually get the answer on the fourth go. I imagine this is true for most people, as we'd expect a 'normal distribution' with very few right on the first or second go (that's a lucky guess) and few taking six (that's some bad luck or a word that has many very similar to it). 

I'm not sharing any new insights on how to solve them – I just do the same as you all do and rule out the most common letters first until I can see what it's likely to be. But what interests me is how quickly you get to the point where it can only realistically be one word. This is normally where I am by guess four. 

Here are a couple of recent ones, where the answers were epoxy and lowly. Just coincidence that they both end in a 'y', I think. I vary my starting words but always try to include some common letters. Sometimes I just use things I see nearby like the dogs' names. In both these cases, by the time I'd had three guesses I didn't have many right, but I had ruled out nearly all the possibilities, and there was only one possible word that I could think of in each case that could fit what I knew. 

This is the most satisfying way of playing the game, I think. If you end up with only one letter to get and several possibilities, it becomes chance and annoying, and if you get it right with some lucky guesses you don't feel like you earnt it, whereas this way you feel happy that you worked it out. 

I also saw Lesley Jeffries talking about doing it in other languages, and noting that her guess distribution was much more spread, presumably because her vocabulary is not a large in those languages and so she is likely to need more goes to get it right than the average speaker of that language would (and she noted that she is relying on phonotactics, which is those rules of the language that I mentioned earlier). 

How many times is too many for words?

How many times do you need to use a word in one piece of writing or speech before it's too many? 

In the novel 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin, a word meaning 'rose-coloured' or 'rosy' is used several times. The version on Project Gutenberg translates it in one of those two ways, and there are 27 instances (24 of rosy, 3 of rose-colored). In my copy it was translated as roseate, an uncommon word, and that was certainly enough times for me to first notice it, then become distracted by it, and eventually become annoyed by it to the point where it's the main thing I remember about the book. I'm sure in the original it's fine and probably has a stylistic purpose but it was way too high frequency for it not to stand out for me. Because it was highly salient, it's stuck in my memory extremely effectively. 

In one of the podcasts I listen to, The Knitmore Girls, one of the hosts used the word cocoon for the second time within an hour-long episode and caught herself, saying she was using that word a lot in that episode. Just two uses isn't that many, certainly not as many as 27 instances of roseate in a short novel, but it was salient enough to stick out for her and so more than once was too many. 

An ilk of that ilk

[Please note that this is a scheduled post, and I am taking part in the ongoing industrial action by my union, UCU.]

You should always learn something at a pub quiz, and I did recently: I learnt what ilk means, as in of that ilk. The question asked us about a phrase that is used generically to mean 'of that type' and specifically in Scottish English and Scots to mean 'of the same name or place'. I had no idea and was coming up with all sorts of nonsense like autochthonous. But of that ilk it was, and once we knew, it was so obvious! An example from the OED of it being used in this way is Wemyss of that ilk, meaning Wemyss of Wemyss. 

Reading the OED entry is really interesting because it was used to mean family or class, and you can see how that's related to the meaning above. But its origin is in a pronoun, it seems, which has come down to Modern English as each or which (Scots is descended from the same predecessor as Modern English is) and that meant same or alike. You could use it like that for a while, as in the OED's example from 1648, During this ilk time.... 

It still seems to be pretty widely used in informal contexts today, as a quick twitter search turns up plenty of examples. You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there's also the occasional sighting of the eggcorn version of that elk. 

Dictionary update ahoy!

I always think of dictionaries as like a huge, slow-moving (but graceful) sea creature, a sort of enormous beast like the avanc in Mieville's The Scar, making inexorable steady progress. Lexicographers probably feel very nimble and agile, skipping through language and keeping abreast of linguistic change as it eddies around them and I'm doing them a terrible disservice. 

Print dictionaries, of course, are hopelessly out of date before they're even published. Online dictionaries can include much more recent usage, though they still tend to be a few years behind what we think of as current, because they need to include general usage with evidence, not just Jay from down the road's definition of a word. 

Dictionary.com published an article about its latest update, with a very thorough overhaul of its entries, including adding #MeToo and af. It's also updated the language in some of its older entries too, though. For instance, it capitalises Black now when referring to Black people/culture, following style guides including AP in doing so. It has also separated out the entries for the word more generally (e.g. the colour) and when it refers to people: 

In the dictionary world, separating the people-related definitions of Black from the other definitions of black is a major—and extremely rare—move. As a rule, different senses of words that share an origin, as lowercase black and uppercase Black historically do, are included under the same entry. It’s a rule worth breaking. Dictionaries are not merely a linguistic exercise or academic enterprise. What are the effects of Black, referring to human beings, being grouped together with black, which can mean, among other things, “wicked”? The effects are social. They are psychological. They are personal. How words are entered into the dictionary—especially words concerning our personal identities—have real effects on real people in the real world.

It's also  reworded the entries referring to gay or gayness to remove the term homosexuality (they now use gay sexual orientation instead). They note that homosexuality now has connotations of 'pathology, mental illness, and criminality'. Whether it always has done, I don't know - one can check these things using concordances and corpora. But this is an interesting case of specialisation, where the term gay has become the default term, and so the use of another term carries some extra layer of meaning and now those connotations are very strong and the word is no longer (if it ever was) neutral. It's a technical-sounding, scientific word, so it makes sense that it would be used for technical things like medical or legal contexts. 

Take a look at the whole article. It's really worth reading, and it includes this list of words that they consider to be late-2010s-defining:

amirite
battle royale
contouring
dead white male
DGAF
Dunning-Kruger effect
empty suit
gender reveal
GOAT
hodophobia
ish
information bubble
jabroni
janky
MAGA
MeToo
nothingburger
swole
world-building
zhuzh

Have you eaten Grandma? (review)

Cover of 'Have you eaten Grandma?'
by Gyles Brandreth

I was considering writing a review of this book, Have you eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth, but to be quite honest it's not worth bothering.
[Edit: I ended up writing a review of it anyway so here you go.]

It's neither surprisingly good nor toe-curlingly awful. I got it for professional purposes (I'm teaching a module on 'Grammar for Everyone' this term and want to look at all sorts of books that claim to be about 'grammar') and I'll get something out of it for that, I suppose, but I'm glad I didn't buy it for pleasure.

I had been ready to be cross about it after seeing this little video in which Gyles (known as being a pedant, has done truly awfully smug programmes about language in the past) talks about some of his 'bugbears' including redundant myself, can I get rather than may I get, and so on. In fact, it's exactly what you expect.

The majority of it is punctuation advice. It's fine, with only a few mistakes, but Eats, Shoots and Leaves is better if that's what you want. Then there's lists of words, either just ones he likes or ones that people often get wrong in writing (accept vs except, for instance) and mnemonics (sometimes very weird ones) to help remember them.

He has a bizarre joy in some -- but not all -- neologisms. He seems to have (like Stephen Fry) come around from pure prescriptivism to the joys of what he calls 'slang' some time in the 1990s, and so he loves things from then. He's constantly saying End of, for example, like at the end of the video above. He gives a long list of initialisms like WTF (which he loves) and describes some of them as being of 'the Whatsapp and Snapchat generation', which needless to say were totally unfamiliar to the teenager I asked. And yet he is so rigidly inflexible about some things that he was taught were correct, and so are immutable rules for him (you mustn't ever, ever say bored of, for example, despite the fact that there's no harm in it whatsoever and millions of people do say it).

There's an embarrassing section of the abbreviations part where he talks about labels for gender and sexuality that verge on poking fun at LGBTQIA-type initialisms. He shows a clear support for non-binary, non-straight identification, but still betrays an opinion of 'simply straight' being 'normal' and 'knowing where you are'. The section on American vs British English is terrible, and relies only the books of people like him, not linguists. This is not a book that seeks to promote truth.

This is very evident throughout, when he often refers to 'the Brandreth Rule' on particular points. This means that he knows that there are different ways of doing things, and his arbitrary choice is the one he likes the best. That's what this book is. It's for people aged about 50 or 60, who 'love the English language', and just want someone who agrees with them to reinforce their opinions and tell them the things they already know so that they can be smug about knowing them. I've come to realise that anyone who says they 'love the English language' doesn't really love the English language, not as it really is. They love some idealised version of it, the version they speak, the version they think is 'best', and which is being 'corrupted' by Americans, kids, foreigners, or modern education.

It's a perfectly acceptable, slightly dull book. If you want to learn some stuff about punctuation or commonly confused words, then it's one way of doing that (but not the best way). If you just want an authority to refer to on certain style points, it'll do that (but there are better authorities to refer to). It's not the best of any of the things it does, but it is by Gyles Brandreth, and that is its selling point. End of. (Sorry, that was such a lazy way to end this but I couldn't resist.)

Oldman, not old man

Another thing I watched over Christmas was a repeat of A Touch of Cloth, a comedy detective series by Charlie Brooker. There's a character in it called Detective Oldman, and many jokes are had around her surname and the phrase old man. The thing is, the name is pronounced differently from the phrase. You pronounce the name with a reduced second vowel, so it's [ˈɒldmən], whereas the phrase old man is pronounced something like [ɒldˈmæn] (the first vowel varies a bit). Even if you don't read IPA, you can see they're different in the vowels used and where the stress is placed. This meant that in the programme, for the jokes to work, her name had to be pronounced like the phrase rather than in the usual way, which sounds decidedly weird. 

Gezellig

The Morris group that I dance with did some workshops for some Dutch children this week. One of the girls said that the evening was gezellig - and she asked me did we have this word? Well, we don't, of course. I tried to kind of mutate it into English and got this far:

1. -ig is an adjective suffix, meaning -y or equivalent. 
2. ge- is a kind of verbal past tense thing, I believe, so this is an adjective formed from a verb

But then I got stuck (it also turns out I was wrong about the ge- bit anyway).

Just from the way it sounded, I suggested 'cosy', even though it didn't seem right in context. I looked it up when I got home and 'cosy' is one of the things it can mean, but the internet also tells me that this is an 'untranslatable' word.

Untranslatable words, it seems to me, come in two or three flavours. There's one kind where a language happens to have a word for a very specific concept. This is not untranslatable; it's just that language X encodes something in one single word that language Y does with a phrase. See, for example, German schadenfreude or Japanese origami (I have no idea how much Germans or Japanese people actually use these words). In this case, as with many others, the way we get round not having a word for this concept is to just borrow it. We also do this with foreign things like food (risotto, wasabi, pak choi, tea...).

There's also words where the translation isn't exact, although there's a bunch of words with similar meanings. See the Language Log entry on 'accountability', for instance. Prepositions are also a problem - they never seem to translate quite right from one language to another, partly because they don't have 'meaning', as such, but rather a grammatical function. These must be annoying for translators and make learning languages a little bit harder/more interesting, but we can learn what the nuances are.

Then there's the kind that seem somehow exotic because they refer to some concept that we hadn't thought about before. These have a great appeal on the internet. I suspect this is because they tend to refer to highly emotional states of mind. Nostalgia would be a good example of this in English, and saudade in Portuguese. They are often claimed to say something about the temperament of the nation that uses that word, so Portuguese or Brazilians are typically melancholic or nostalgic. We know the fallacy of attributing a characteristic to a whole nation, but nevertheless we like to do it because it helps us to label people.

Gezellig is said on Wikipedia to 'encompass the heart of Dutch culture', so it's a good example of one of these 'untranslatable words'. Wiktionary says it means 'companionable, having company with a pleasant, friendly atmosphere, cosy atmosphere or an upbeat feeling about the surroundings'.

It also says it comes from gezel, which means 'companion'. So much for my etymological analysis.

Metaphysicians and metaphysicists

I spent a couple of days this week at a philosophy conference. It was really interesting, especially as some of the talks were about the philosophy of language. On the first evening, I went to the pub with some of the philosophers and we talked about things I didn't understand all night. One of those things was metaphysics, which I had of course heard of, but didn't know what it was. We talked about it and its relation to physics, and I think I kind of now know vaguely what sort of a thing it is.

At some point I used the word 'metaphysicist' to describe someone who studies metaphysics, and was told that it is actually 'metaphysician'. This surprised me, because I formed the word without really thinking about it (which indicates that the word-formation process I used is highly productive), but probably on the basis of 'physicist' - someone who studies physics. 'Physician' is a word as well, of course, but it means basically the same as 'doctor'. The suffixes -ian and -ist are both used to form nouns meaning 'someone who does X'. Someone on Stack Exchange suggests -ian is more general and -ist more specialist, and this article by Laurie Bauer notes that -ician gained a 'trivialising' effect at some point around a century ago (though it's since lost that negative connotation).

I suspect it might be an effort on the part of metaphysicians to distance themselves from physicists. Or maybe there are people who, like me, enjoy being contrary and using the other one (I frequently refer to myself as a linguistician).

Ten hundred words of confusing syntax

There's an interesting blog called 'Ten hundred words of science', in which people try to explain their research using only the thousand most common words of English (go to the page to find out why and how these words were determined). 

Here's a couple of screenshots: 

You'll notice that using simple words can have the unfortunate consequence of requiring very complicated syntax. The first paragraph is very hard to parse, especially that first sentence which has a very long subject [Big human like men animals that people go to see at parks they pay to get into]. It also has a comma following the subject which is strictly incorrect, but which would only add to the difficulty if it wasn't there. Similarly, the last sentence uses incorrect commas to try to clarify a very awkward construction.

The second entry, on the right here, has an almost incomprehensible sentence in it, the first sentence in the second paragraph. It does get better, and of course I picked two of the worst ones in this respect, but it just shows: simpler words does not necessarily mean simpler writing.

Interesting uses for linguistics 1

In the book '48 hours' by J Jackson Bentley (a fairly crappy crime thriller), forensic corpus linguistics turned up. In the book, a woman is kidnapped and her kidnappers make her send a videoed message to her boyfriend. She's a smart cookie so she gives lots of coded information about where she's being held in the message, including the word 'print'. The police try to find out what she might mean by this. They do that by running the word through a database to see what words 'print' occurs with most often.

“Luke again,” the speaker chirped. The computer is showing that the word ‘print’ can be associated with the word ‘press’ in the next sentence, as in ‘printing press’. This could be code for Dee telling us that the industrial unit houses a printing press.”

There's a good deal of suspension of disbelief required to get through this book, but this is a real thing. It's called 'collocation': when a word tends to co-occur with another one with greater than chance frequency.

If you look at a corpus (collection of texts) like the British National Corpus, you can very easily make it tell you this stuff (I'm no corpus linguist and even I can do it). Here's a screenshot of what happens if you look for the words that most frequently occur immediately after the word 'print' or one of its derivatives (such as 'printing'). The photo's a bit small but 'press' is there on the list, in eighth most common position (if I've worked the search terms right), after things like 'characters', 'material' and so on. I suppose, if you were looking for a clue to a place, 'press' would be the first one to give you anything to go on.

You can click on the words and find out what the context is, just in case there's some false results or you want more detail or whatever, and you get this:

That shows you the type of writing it was found in, and gives you the bit of sentence either side so that you can understand the phrase in context. I'm not really au fait with police techniques, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if they do use this kind of method when it's appropriate. There are such people as forensic linguists who work closely with the police, whose job is often to determine if a particular person is the author or a document.

Spoiler alert: 

So they located a nearby printing press and, after much showdown, rescued 'the girls', as the two adult hostages were patronisingly referred to throughout. 

Onomatopoeia from my students

In my first-year introductory seminar, I had the students coming up with new onomatopoeic words, which we then tried to guess the meaning of (spoilers: you usually can't guess, despite the supposed relation of the sound of the word to the sound it describes). Some of the words seemed quite useful, so here they are:

frip: the sound of flicking or rifling through a sheet or sheets of paper.
shplup: the sound of dropping something damp onto a hard surface.
zhoom: the sound of a car going by at high speed.
ouge (pronounced like 'rouge'): the noise of a washing machine.
mmm: the noise a fridge makes.
shlup: the noise it makes when you drink from a bottle with a 'sports cap'.
twing: the melodious jingling of windchimes or bracelets. 

I thought there were some very nice creative ones, and some interesting similarities in words or definitions.

Swansea question tag on 'the Call Centre'?

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and watched a truly horrific programme called 'The Call Centre'. It's a 'structured reality' programme, which basically means getting real people to provide cheap, low quality, soap opera type entertainment. It's set in a call centre in Swansea and most of the young call centre workers have very strong Swansea accents. It's a really distinctive accent so I began to enjoy the programme for its linguistic appeal, if nothing else.

Accent is the thing we notice most about the way people from other areas of the country speak, but dialect is not only a matter of accent. Accent is only the sounds: things like what vowel you use in 'bath' or whether you tend to use a fully aspirated /k/ sound in the middle of 'chicken'. Dialect is 'accent plus'. It includes lexis (words), morphology (whether you say 'I've gone' or 'I've went'), and syntax (whether you can say 'Hasn't she not?' or just 'Hasn't she?').

The Swansea accent is great, but what struck me was a matter of syntax. I don't know if it really is a feature of the Swansea dialect, but what I heard was what sounded like an invariant question tag 'inne' (not sure how to spell that, but it sounds like 'innie').

A tag question is one that ends in a tag, like 'isn't it', 'wasn't she', 'aren't they' and so on. These tags vary to match the subject and verb of the main clause, so you get 'That's nice, isn't it?', 'She was good, wasn't she?', and 'The students are keen, aren't they?' Invariant tags, as the name implies, don't vary. We see ones like 'right', 'yeah' and 'no', but we also see ones that look like they should vary. 'Innit' is the famous one: 'He's a good worker, innit?' (rather than 'isn't he').

This 'inne' that I heard, twice in one episode, sounds like a reduced form of 'isn't he'. If you're going to have an invariant tag, then you just pick one of the available tags, and 'isn't he' is just as good as 'isn't it' (well, I would have a preference for 'it', but preference has never had much to do with language).

The thing is, I only heard it twice in that one episode. I watched another one (for research...) and didn't hear it again. Any Welsh readers know if it's widely used?

Q is for 'search'

My grandma got an ipad recently (which means that now she reads this blog: hello Rosemary!). I was playing with it a while back and one of the things that came up was what the little symbol that looked like a Q meant.

Explore: Words around the world

You may remember that I did a talk for the Centre for Lifelong Learning's Explore programme last year, as part of a training exercise in presenting research to a public audience. I found it a very enjoyable challenge to present my PhD work to people who had no specialist knowledge of linguistics. 

Happily, they invited me back to do a session on the themed season 'The Word'. Well, seeing as words are a large chunk of what linguists study, that sounded like good fun. I've been teaching morphology all term, and so I thought I'd do a bit of a romp through some fun morphological stuff. 

The nice thing about doing a one-off session for fun is that you don't have to make sure they grasp all the fine points of the technical terminology, so you can essentially leave out the boring bits and just do the fun bits. I thought that for this session, I'd get them to think about what words are, so first of all we built words out of morphemes (parts of words) written on cards, and I introduced them to the concept of building words from smaller parts and how this works in different languages. We also covered a few 'language myths' (Eskimo words for snow, no word for X, Sapir-Whorf and colour terms, etc.) and finished by thinking about how to define 'word'. 

The venue was St Nicholas' cathedral in the centre of Newcastle, and rather than in one of the function rooms, I actually spoke in the south transept: 

This was a lovely venue for a talk, and made a nice change from seminar rooms. 

The audience was the best I could have wished for, interacting with me right from the start and asking intelligent questions that showed they were really interested in the topic. They contributed some interesting facts and examples of their own, and overall made it a truly fun afternoon. 

When a word becomes unacceptable

There's been a spate of ableist language in my life this week (that is, language that discriminates against people with disabilities).

Person-in-charge

Aw, look, I just noticed this reference to 'person-in-charge' on my fire safety instructions.


What a cute construction.

A @name

Twitter has a search bar thing and in it, it says "enter a @name or username". Now, I've been pronouncing @name as "at name", because that to me is an "at sign". I don't know if twitter is calling it something else. That's what the article "a" rather than "an" suggests. But what could it be calling it?

In other languages, it's called things like "monkey tail", "elephant's trunk", "little dog", "snail" and other animal-based names reflecting its shape. But in English it's really only called the "at sign".

So twitter, why you no obey phonological rules?

Search for nouns

Some people have noticed that the search bar on facebook looks like this, and suggested an improvement:

They think it should read 'Search for nouns'. 


I'm not having a go at these people; the OED defines 'noun' as follows:

A word used as the name or designation of a person, place, or thing.

Wikipedia sensibly adds or idea to its definition, however, as liberty and disappointment are both nouns, and further down expands this to: 

person, place, thing, event, substance, quality, quantity, or idea, etc.

Because Wikipedia is often written by experts, it's a lot more detailed than the OED and goes on to tell us that this definition is not very useful on account of it's a bit fuzzy and doesn't tell us much, and that it's better to have  a formal definition based on the properties of the elements we class as nouns. 

One way to do this is to use such characteristics as 'can occur with a determiner like a or the', or 'can take plural inflection -s'. These characteristics are often not cross-linguistic, but can help to identify nouns if you know the rules for the languages you're interested in. In beginning syntax classes I hand out a cheat sheet with just such tests. 

As I think I've mentioned before, the distinguishing characteristic of nouns that linguists generally use is if they behave like nouns. Does that sound circular? What I mean is, the name 'noun' is used to refer to a class of words that all behave in the same way. They can be the subject of a sentence, for instance, or the object of a verb or preposition. These are grammatical characteristics. The 'people, places and things' definition is a semantic definition: it describes what nouns mean or refer to. 

We can use both to identify nouns, but the semantic definition is not appropriate to denote what facebook wishes you to search for; it does not think you should search in that box for love, peace and understanding; it will not bring you success (or at least, not as an abstract noun). 

Forever and for ever

There are lots of expressions, mostly with quantifiers (all, every etc.), that can be written as one word or two. Generally, it makes a difference to the meaning:

Every day: daily (it rained every day for a week)
Everyday: common, unexceptional (it was an everyday occurrence)
All right: everything correct
Alright: agreement
Any one: free choice of one out of all of these (you can choose any one ice cream)
Anyone: existential or universal pronoun (anyone could understand that)

And so on.

But I got to thinking about forever/for ever. Most of the time, it doesn't seem to make a difference which one you use:

It was taking for ever to finish the essay.
It was taking forever to chop all the potatoes for the stew. 

It's sort of surprising that, given that these other expressions have different meanings, that it would just be free variation. For isn't a quantifier, but I don't know that that should make a difference. I checked my copy of Fowler's and found the following:

1. It's two words when the meaning is 'for all future time' or 'in perpetuity' (he said he would love her for ever).
2. It's one word when the meaning is 'continually, persistently, always' (the children are forever asking about more pocket money).
3. It doesn't matter when the meaning is 'for a long time' (as above). 

I still think you could get away with forever even in the first one, though perhaps not for ever in the second. Almost free variation, then.