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OP didn't do it alone. He did it by himself. A person can do almost everything by himself, but almost nothing alone.
by ronilan 13y ago
OP didn't do it alone. He did it by himself.
A person can do almost everything by himself, but almost nothing alone.
- SEMW 13y agoI've read your comment a few times, but I'm still failing to extract anything semantically meaningful from it. Could you clarify?
- sthatipamala 13y ago"By himself" = physical isolation "alone" = societal, emotional, or other abstract isolation
- graeme 13y agoYou could interchange these definitions, and they would be correct. English has a lot of word pairs where you can say "This is not X, it is Y", where the statement would work in reverse. Both alone and 'by himself' have both physical and moral meanings.
- sthatipamala 13y agoPossibly. I'm just inferring the GP's distinction of the terms from context.