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.”)
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.”)
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 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.
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.