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.”)
If I were to rely on my “guts”:
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 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.