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1 point by zach 6119 days ago | link | parent | on: some versus any

That does seem to be the precedent and I initially couldn't fathom why it was not used.

But one good reason is that "some" can be ordinarily used in some declarative senses in which "any" doesn't work. For example, compare:

"I see some of these numbers are odd."

and

"I see any of these numbers are odd."

And even if the second way was ordinary usage, it would seem to imply that all the numbers are odd.

Since "some" has this quality, you can mentally parse Arc statements using "some" into statements like the one above.

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1 point by kennytilton 6119 days ago | link

But compare: "Let's see if some of these keys work" and "Let's see if any of these keys work" Above "some"'s usage would mean looking for more than one, whereas "any"s intent is to find one key that works and stop looking.

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