With regard to everywhere: allow me to tip my hat to CoolHandLouis’ handle and say that “What we have here is a failure to communicate across registers.”†
The primary function of language—not just English but any language, not just some or many languages but all languages and every language—is to mediate ordinary everyday discourse: what grammarians call the ‘colloquial register’.
I have written elsewhere on this site that the colloquial register is governed by the ‘Tolerance Maxim’: Whatever should be understood may be omitted. That is, the colloquial register tolerates a great degree of imprecision because speakers-together assume that they bring to the discourse a common understanding of words and syntax and the real world which does not have to be explicitly articulated.
For instance, if you say to me, in the course of the conversation you have described, “Oh, yeah, we’ve got voodoo dolls everywhere in India”, there are many critical qualifications to that statement which you tacitly assume I bring to interpreting your utterance:
- You assume that I understand that when you say voodoo you don’t intend a specific reference to the practices of Louisiana Voodoo or Haitian Vodou or American Hoodoo or Dahomeyan Vodun but to an Indian practice analogous to these.
- You assume that I understand that when you say everywhere the scope of the every piece is not all places but the places specifically identified earlier in the discourse, viz., construction sites.
- Most importantly for our current discussion, you assume that I understand that the collocation everywhere does not mean “in every place of the sort previously defined” but “widely distributed throughout places of the sort previously defined”.
In the colloquial register this is not a problem: everybody understands that everywhere means “in lots of places”, just as somewhere means “in at least one place”. It only becomes problematic when you move terms like these into the formal register. The formal register is based on the written language, which does not tolerate nearly so much ‘conversational implicature’ as the spoken language. It is governed by the ‘Adamantine Law’: Whatever can be misunderstood will be.
Scientists and philosophers and mathematicians and programmers require a very high degree of expressive precision. Their form of discourse needs terms like some and every and many to mean the same thing in every context; the common understanding which prevails in the colloquial register is intolerably contingent and sloppy for their purposes. (It is not in fact sloppy, it is quite precise; but it is contingent.) This is very amusingly illustrated in a brief monologue from the revue Beyond the Fringe in which Jonathan Miller impersonates the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell; you may listen to it here.
The upshot is that terms like somewhere and anywhere and everywhere should be avoided in the formal register. In fact, my wife (who teaches Freshman Composition at a local university) explicitly tells her students that the some-, any-, every- terms are Red Flags: they almost always tell her that the writer has failed to specify something which needs narrower specification. In the formal register using a coinage like manywhere, to distinguish your meaning from somewhere and everywhere is simply an evasion of the real problem, which is that you shouldn’t be using these terms at all. You should be saying exactly what you mean, which is probably something on the order of:
We find dolls of this sort on construction sites throughout India.
Best Answer
In the first place, you are constructing a false parallel. Somewhere does not mean “at some [=indefinite number of] places [plural]”; it means “at some [=indefinite] place [singular]”. I read that somewhere, for instance, does not mean “I read that in a small number of sources” but “I read that in at least one place which I cannot (or will not) at this moment identify”.
In the second place, history demonstrates that manywhere is ‘an elegant and logical solution’ to a problem which does not exist. Take a look at the Google Ngram display (I have had Google graph the incidence of manywhere as a proportion of the incidence of manywhere to anywhere, to give a clearer indication of frequency):
Over the past 100 years there's one spike at around 5,000:1, and a couple more at 17,000:1 or less. The 1902-1903 spike is particularly interesting. Henry James floated the word in an 1894 short story (other early hits are false positives), but it was Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock), a distinguished banker and politician and writer on archaeology and evolution, who successfully launched it in The Scenery of England, 1902, where he tossed off the sentence ‘Smoothed and polished rocks occur also “manywhere”, if I may coin the word, in our northern districts…’
The coinage excited considerable comment in newspapers and journals; this is representative:
The word had a brief vogue (mainly among geologists, ethnologists and, as Printers Ink predicted, adwriters), but eventually disappeared again. In this respect it contrasts significantly with two other words coined by Lord Avebury: neolithic and paleolithic, which are still in use.
I'll leave it to others to explore the tiny post-WWI and post-WWII spikes; but it’s pretty clear that however useful manywhere may appear in theory, the speaking, hearing, reading and writing public has no practical need for it.
This should not discourage you from employing manywhere as a peculiarly expressive member of your own lexicon. Its meaning is transparent, so you need not fear misunderstanding; and it strikes me as a cheerful sort of word, which could lend a spritely air to your discourse. You might even create a new vogue for it—and perhaps Lord Avebury was a century ahead of his public, and now is the time for the word to enter common parlance.