Wrote H.G. Wells in 1920, noted in the OED entry for "somewhen," an unusual word, but a word nonetheless.
Discovered upon contemplating the question why we have the word "somewhere" but not "somewhen," because I was thinking about how you can travel to different locations but must accept that you are where you are in the flow of time. I was delighted to see that "somewhen" really was a word and to encounter the example from Wells, who, of course, dreamed up the time machine.
Grammarphobia has a very substantial discussion of the word "somewhen" — "Somewhen over the rainbow." Excerpt:
Somewhen, we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight — if it's not too dear...If people rarely use “somewhen” today, that’s probably because they prefer “sometime,” which means the same thing. When they do produce a “somewhen,” it’s nearly always used semi-humorously or for deliberate effect....The OED’s earliest example in modern English is from a letter written in 1833 by John Stuart Mill: “I shall write out my thoughts more at length somewhere, and somewhen, probably soon.”
The fact that Mill used italics for the “when” indicates that he didn’t consider this an ordinary compound but rather a droll variation on “somewhere.”...
Incidentally, “somewhen” isn’t the only English compound that’s become a rare bird. “Anywhen” (at any time) and “nowhen” (at no time) were once part of the language too....
[Update: A reader in the UK writes on Oct. 3, 2022, to say that even today “somewhen” remains in use as a stand-alone adverb: “It is still in common usage on its own, on the Isle of Wight, England.”]
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"Any" is just "some" in a non-assertive context (question or negative sentence).
i'm not sure it (somewhen) rolls off the tongue very well.
When i say it it comes out more like someOne. I'm guessing that's why sometime took over
We also have somehow, someway, and somewhat. What we're missing is somewho.
Somewhy it just doesn't seem that important, Ann.
That was how little we knew a century ago. The oldest Neanderthal fossils are dated at 430,000 years ago, meaning they began to appear 130,000 years before the first, most primitive, members of our own species.
if he didn't know the origin point, somewhen seems plausible,
‘Somewhen in Time’ (1980) Traveling without moving.
In 1972, playwright Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) becomes fascinated by a photo of Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour), a turn-of-the-century stage actress, while staying at the Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Michigan. As Richard's obsession grows, he learns from a friend that time travel may actually be possible through hypnosis. …
Come to think of it, isn’t “time travel” redundant?
I suppose it’s necessary to distinguish movie time travel and the more mundane 4th of July time travel.
I like it. I'm going to start using it, just to annoy somewho around me. And/or in writing.
Somewhen? Somewhere? And Joe Biden.
Biden has made the same [Iran/Russia] gaffe on numerous occasions, and has repeatedly described himself as a U.S. senator since being sworn in as president.
What they're saying: "Time-shifting is when a person’s experience is that they are living at an earlier time in their life," the Alzheimer's Society (U.K.) writes on its website. "They may become disorientated and confused about time and place."
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/joe-biden-media-cover-up/
I think “sometime” has the meaning you are looking for in “somewhen.”
Somehow, somewhat, somewhere, now somewhen...I was wondering when somewho would make a grand entrance, wondering somewhy.
I don't think I've heard "somewhen" before.
In his 1970 book Jonathon Livingston Seagull Richard Bach uses the term "anywhen", often as anywhere and anywhen ,ultiple times. I've always liked it and use it occasionally. I don't think I've seen it anywhere else over the past 50 years since I read the book.
A quick Duck Duck Go search shows that it is a perfectly cromulent word.
Other than the word, that the book is about a seagull and that Bach is the author, I remember absolutely nothing about the book. Or the LP I probably still have with a reading of it.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to Richard at a dinner 24 years ago and commented on it. He told me that it was an extremely unusual word in normal usage and he used it to make people notice what he was saying. He also had the good grace to be slightly embarrassed about Jonathon Livingston Seagull. Perhaps the only book he is known for and it bought him a lot of airplanes. But he wrote about a dozen books and all are good. Many are about flying, fiction and non.
John LGB Henry
Big Mike writes, "The oldest Neanderthal fossils are dated at 430,000 years ago, meaning they began to appear 130,000 years before the first, most primitive, members of our own species."
I don't fully understand the 130,000-year interval, not a criticism, but a genuine question arising from my ignorance. Please explain this in more detail.
Secondly, taxonomy is always a bone of contention stuck in the throat of paleontology generally, but especially paleoanthropology because the data are so scattershot. As I understand it, there are three fundamental opinions about the Neanderthals, those who emphasize the genomic differences put them in their own species, i.e. Homo neanderthalensis, which appears to be the majority opinion, and the contrary and minority view which holds them to be an extinct subspecies of modern humankind, i.e. Home sapiens neanderthalensis. (Hardcore phylogenetics has grown increasingly dismissive of the subspecies concept generally.) And lastly, the exasperating fence sitters who'd rather not talk systematics at all. How does your opinion fit in, Big Mike?
I think I first encountered somewhen in an episode of "Peabody's Improbable History". Sherman the Pet Boy opens the show with the question, where to today, Mr. Peabody, which gets immediately corrected to somewhen by the world-famous tail-wagging scholar and adventurer.
Althouse writes, "...Homo Neanderthalensis."
Regarding the incorrect capitalization of the binomial nomenclature, is that Wells' error, a website typo, or yours? As a former subscriber, I cannot check the OED site myself.
As I pointed out to Big Mike, early opinions about that extinct people confined them in their own species based on exaggerated and often bestial reconstructed physiognomies. After WWII, probably as part of the blanket rejection of National Socialist racialism, scholars began to paper over the Neanderthals' skeletal distinctiveness, "humanizing" them into just folks like everyone else, (Man, I could wax both eloquent and verbose over the left's insane vocabulary, especially the monstrous twins, humanizing and dehumanizing.) shoehorning them into H. sapiens in the process. However, recently recovered Neanderthal DNA puts them back into their own sometimes nastily slandered species, Neanderthal being a favorite feminist insult, neanderthalensis.
Who needs "somewhen" when we already have the much more useful (and truer) "never"?
https://www.cartoonstock.com/blog/how-about-never-the-beat-goes-on/
Whensoever I see the word somewhen, I am going to think it contrived.
"That was how little we knew a century ago."
I am listening to Fenyman's Lectures from 1961 and am struck with how much physics we didn't know not that long ago. Particle physics was a zoo of particles nobody knew what to do with. Apparently, we thought the Earth was 5.5 Gy old (now thought to be 4.5 Gy). The age of the universe was fuzzy (the CMB hadn't been discovered yet).
But I'm gaining insights through his cautious, skeptical attitude. Like when he introduced conservation of energy he started out by saying we really don't know what energy is, but if we define this quantity called energy we find it is conserved. Actually, he said we have never found a case where it is not conserved. making the explicit point that there is no compelling principle that it has to be true, just an observation that we have never seen it violated. The question is always an open one. We could use a dose of the skepticism today.
Before Wells, all the way back to ancient days, time travel was usually a matter of oversleeping. (I used to wonder how it was that a man could remain in one spot through geological ages and not get bruised in the process.)
Nowhere breaks down into Now Here.
I've used 'somewhen' jokingly on occasion, like 'somebitch.'
Did Mills write the letter in longhand? Now I want to see it because I'm impressed that someone could insert italics into their writing instead of just putting it in quotation marks to show it's meant to be italicized. Perhaps it isn't as hard as I imagine if the writer is skilled in calligraphy.
I would have assumed that Mills just wrote it normally and some editor italicized it later when it was printed because he didn't think it was a cromulent word.
BC: What shall we call this new animal?
XX: What does it do?
BC: It eats ants.
XX: An eatanter.
making the explicit point that there is no compelling principle that it has to be true, just an observation that we have never seen it violated
that is (well, USED To BE) a fundamental core of quantum mechanics.
Science isn't (CAN'T BE, and Doesn't TRY to be) "true".. It tries to be ACCURATE.
IF (and ONLY IF) science makes predictions on events; That turn out to be ACCURATE, then it's Good Science.
Climate Change "Science" makes predictions, that turn out to be UTTERLY false.. It's bad science
String Theory doesn't Even MAKE predictions.. it's Not Even Wrong
Italics in longhand is done by underlining.
I vaguely recall a short mystery story titled "Elsewhen." Summary: An inventor named (I am almost positive) Harrison Partridge invents a time-travel device and uses it to go kill some rich relative. Man investigating the crime has report of HP going in to the victim's home bearing some sort of device, and then vanishing into thin air just before the victim is found.
For some reason HP has to commit a second murder. For the first one, he'd done the alibi first and then gone back to commit the crime; this time he switches it around. Only the investigator spots him near the would-be site of the second crime and accidentally kills him. And then goes back to HP's house, where HP opens the door to him. Because in this timeline, he's still alive.
I had thought Google would turn this one up, but sadly, no.
>>>>>I vaguely recall a short mystery story titled "Elsewhen."......... I had thought Google would turn this one up, but sadly, no.<<<<<<<<
http://moonlight-detective.blogspot.com/2022/11/golden-age-locked-room-mysteries-2022.html
https://epdf.pub/elsewhen56dcb4c86d4a2e9d73f1ce905b96756968804.html
Good friend in the UK uses "somewhen" and "anywhen" all the time, where we would use "sometime" and "any time."
Nice to know if you're getting paid by the keystroke.
If only I had known of my H. neanderthalensis blood quantum back in the day, I might have parlayed that into some sort of AA advantage.
I dealt with mss materials in my work; if I transcribed a handwritten document with underlining I underlined, and if a word or phrase was in quotes I used quotes. It is true that underlining is suggested for italics when writing by hand, but I wonder how far back that goes and why underlining isn't good enough by itself.
They both express emphasis.
A manager of mine, Scottish to the bone, once told me to stop everything I was doing and work on a high priority task. When I asked if I should skip a weekly mandatory group meeting, he replied, "Out with that!"
I missed the meeting, and spent half an hour convincing him that Scottish idiom had the reverse meaning in American English. To him, he meant,c"Except that."
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