Is there any difference in meaning between "She is not around" and "She is not here"? I heard both, but never quite got the difference.
Learn English – ny difference in meaning between “She is not around” and “She is not here”
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I would suggest that 'frighten' is more intense than 'scare'. Although they are (very) similar, being scared is less serious than being frightened. That is definitely a second-order effect though; to a first approximation, they are (almost) equivalent.
J.R. mentioned a distinction that applies in some cases and noted that because of the wide range of uses of the two phrases, there might not be a “universal way to differentiate when one should be used instead of the other”.
Another distinction (similar in that it applies in some cases but far from all) is that “Here we go” is frequently inclusive of the speaker, and “There we go” frequently is not. A very few of the examples of “Here we go” and “There we go” found in A Collection of Confusible Phrases
by Yuri Dolgopolov illustrate this:
Another distinction is that “here we go” is found 10 times more commonly (in Google Books English-language corpus) than is “there we go”, and many instances of the latter are irrelevancies like “From there we go to Spain”.
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This is a pretty interesting question. The answer is that there is a difference, but it's kind of subtle.
What they have in common: If someone just isn't present, they are both not here and not around.
Difference: "not here" says that she isn't here, in the room, right at this moment. "not around" is a statement that implies that she will not be around in the future. (Super technical note: That's a simplification. "She's not around" implies that she won't be here in the future relative to the context of the question; see my examples below)
If someone without a mother (either because the mother is dead or moved away) were to be asked "Where's your mother?", a common response would be "She's not around anymore." This automatically gives the idea that she's out of the picture for good.
"We could get your friend's help on this problem. Is he here?" 1) "He's not here." (He's not here -- but we might be able to get him.) 2) "He's not around." (He's not here, and we won't be able to get him for help on this problem)