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.”)
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As a non-native speaker, wouldn’t falling in the hole be the act of crossing the opening, and falling down the hole be the rest of the way?
As a native English speaker, I had no idea going into this discussion, but that sounds like a pretty good explanation!
Now, is there a difference between falling down and falling into the hole?..
I would have guessed that into and in are interchangeable for this case, at least in US English. But in other contexts into is a direction, in is a position.
Falling into it includes the travel time (potentially from a great height), whereas in mostly pertains to the end state?
That would mean into and down refer to different parts of the falling timeline.
Instead of the travel time, I think that the matter here is the movement: “into” implies movement, so it can be only used when there’s a change in position. And the interchangeability in this case is caused by the fact that, while “in” doesn’t imply movement, it doesn’t imply its lack either.
Other IE languages also show this sort of grammatical movement marking, although through different ways. For reference, in Latin:
- cecidi in foveam - I fell into a hole (accusative because movement)
- cecidi in foveā - I fell in a hole (dative; I’d interpret it as lack of movement, unlike English “in”, but I’m not certain on that)
English also used to have this distinction in the auxiliary verbs that you’d use with the past - “be” if there’s movement (even metaphorical), “have” otherwise. You see this for example in Oppenheimer’s translation of Bhagavad Gita, “I am become Death” (modern: “I have become Death”), but eventually this usage of “be” was completely replaced with “have”. German still does it but… it’s complicated since movement itself isn’t the sole factor, the main verb also dictates the auxiliary to some degree:
- ich bin in ein Loch gefallen - I have fell into a hole
- ich *habe in ein Loch gefallen - this simply sounds weird
As a native speaker, that makes sense, but they still both sound interchangeable.
Edit: In this situation, anyway. Other people are pointing out that “down a hole” wouldn’t work if it was a hole you couldn’t actually be “inside of”, like a pothole in a road. In that case “in a hole” would still be okay, as it’s a partial kind of “in” like water in a dish.
The pragmatics of the sentence in the comic is that the person is in/down the hole, and this is not a normal state of affairs. The exact sort of envelopment isn’t emphasised, and I imagine the choice would come down to exact idiolect. I’d say “down”, I picture someone from another province or old for “in”.
“Down” definitely implies vertical entry, although it could be an abstract downwards, like “he’s further down the tunnel” - an entry is imagined as being at the top by default.
I feel like I’d use “Fell in a hole” if I took up most of the space of the hole, and could probably get out on my own, while I’d use “Fell down a hole” if I took up very little of the space of the hole, and couldn’t get out on my own.
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.
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”
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.
Similar for me - I think the depth of the hole matters more? It would sound odd to say “I fell down a pothole”.
What if said hole had big pointy sharpened sticks at the bottom?
I don’t think I’d be saying much then.
Agreed. I feel like the dimensions of the hole is relevant. Like if it has to be wider than it is deep to fall in. But it be needs to be deeper than is wide to fall down into.
And maybe the hole has to be at least wide enough that you can lie horizontally in to fall in it? Not sure about that though. But when falling down a hole, that definitely doesn’t matter. The hole has to be deeper that I am tall for me to fall down it, horizontal width doesn’t matter, it’s all about the vertical in that case.
If I was walking and stumbled into a hole: “fell in a hole”
If I was climbing in/around the hole intentionally and stumbled: “fell down a hole”
It all depends on how actively involved with the hole I was and if I knew of it’s existence.
I think people who think that know more pedants than linguistics and either confuse the former for the latter, or when they meet a real linguist, the linguist’s questions sound on first glance like the pedant’s ones they are uses to. But I have no empirical data to prove my point
I feel like the pedant would be instead bossing others around, with a “you mean that you «fell into» a hole”. Or perhaps voicing useless trivia, like “fun fact: some people say «fell in a hole»! The more you know~”.
In the meantime, the linguist doing this (from anecdotal evidence, I’d say that plenty do it) is motivated by curiosity, not trying to show off; in spirit he’s the same as “that kid” who disassembles objects to understand how they work, it’s just that the curiosity comes off in the wrong situation.
Falling down a hole is a subset of falling in a hole that accounts for different reverence frames and gravity (falling up a hole for e.g.).
This sounds traumatically similar to the questions a learner of a foreign language would ask me.
“Which is correct, to say I have gone there or I went there?”
Yeah with english the answer is usually “both are correct but this way sounds better.”
Basically how english works… go with what sounds right, and if it isn’t right the linguists will eventually declare to be right anyway.
And don’t feel bad, I once met an asian woman that said “an Irish guy that works at the restaurant gave me a list of common english expressions, but some of them don’t look right and I’m not sure if he was just joking around, can you take a look?”
First thing on the list was:
I’m tired -> “I’ve been laying around flicking the bean all day.”
So I had to explain what “flicking the bean” actually meant to a woman I just met that was just learning English. Thanks, Ireland!
Man, what kind of asshole does that to a lady who is just learning a language?
That’s a good one, damn. Flick the bean off, what a great phrase.
Thank you! I should’ve linked it in the OP. My bad, fixing it right now!
No worries, I was looking for the explain xkcd and the comic url was there for me to share :)
Meanwhile in Swedish, leaving out either word would sound super wrong. I fell down in a hole.
Nice one
Falling in a hole implies you are already in the hole. Falling into a whole is equivalent to falling down a hole.
