English stock, but who give themselves no care about their use of words, speaking their mother tongue merely as they have learned it from the mouths of their kinsfolk and acquaintance, such phrases as some three or four, some few. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose English, as well as whose thought, merits the attention and admiration of his readers, says "some fifty" in a passage in "The Guardian Angel." Thackeray, in one of his lectures on the Queen Anne Wits, has this passage:
And some five miles on the road, as the Exeter fly comes jingling and creaking onwards, it will suddenly be brought to a halt by a gentleman on a grey mare, etc., etc.
Prior closes his epigram on "Phillis's Age" with the line—
And Phyllis is some forty-three.
Bacon is quoted by Dr. Johnson (not upon this point, however) as using not only the phrase "some two thousand," but "some good distance," "some good while;" and Raleigh, in one of his letters, has the following passage:
Being encountered with a strong storm some eight leagues to the westward of Sicily, I held it office of a commander to take a port.
Shakespeare, in "Richard III.," writes:
Has she forgot already that brave prince,
Edward her lord, whom I, some three months since.
Stabbed in my angry mood at Tewksbury?
and in "Twelfth Night:"
Some four or five attend on him:
All, if you will.
If a man sin against the English language by using some in the manner in question, he will do it in very good company; and is it not better to sin with the elect than to be righteous with the reprobate? But in the determination of such a question as this we must not defer to mere usage. There is some misuse of language that can be justified by no authority.
Some is one of the oldest simple, underived, uncompounded and unmodified words in the English language; in the Anglo-Saxon part of which it can be traced without change, as som or sum, generally the latter, for a thousand years. Its meaning during that whole period seems not to have been enlarged, diminished or inflected in the slightest degree, in either popular or literary usage. That meaning is—an indeterminate quantity or number, greater or less, considered apart from the whole existing number. Some is separative; it implies others; and contrasts with many. It is segregative, and sets apart, either a number, though indefinite, from another and generally a larger number, or an individual person or thing not definite. It corresponds not only to the Latin aliquantum but to quidem and aliquis, and to circiter. Such has been its usage always in English and in Anglo Saxon. Let us, for instance, examine the passage in the Gospels about the centurion
