I see both phrases the other way around and the other way round very often. Which is correct? Please provide usage examples.
Learn English – “The other way around” or “the other way round”
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Related Solutions
Q1. How to distinguish between past participles used as adjectives and past participles that have a passive meaning?
Past participles that have a passive meaning have an explicit or implicit agent.
- She is admired by everyone who knows her (explicit).
- Your help is appreciated (implicit, by me).
- The price of petrol has been reduced (implicit, by the oil company).
Such past participles are typically not modified by very, but by very much or an alternative adverb:
- She is greatly admired. (?She is very admired.)
- Your help is very much appreciated. (?Your help is very appreciated.)
- The price of petrol has been significantly reduced. (?The price of petrol has been very reduced.)
Past participles used as adjectives very often describe mental or emotional states, and therefore have a person or animal as their subject. There is no explicit agent, and often not even an implicit one. Such past participles are typically modified by very, not by very much.
- I'm very bored. (?I'm very much bored.)
- John's been very depressed for several days. (?John's been very much depressed for several days.)
- She looked very disappointed. (?She looked very much disappointed.)
Q2. Which adjectives to use with very and which adjectives to use with very much.
As noted in the section above, past participle adjectives that describe mental states are generally modified by very, not very much. Most other adjectives are also modified by very alone. However, there are some common exceptions. For example, adjectives that describe extreme qualities are not usually modified by either very or very much (?very enormous, ?very much wonderful). There is another group of adjectives that needs a different modifier than very (fast asleep, wide awake, far apart, well known, etc.)
Q3. "This looks very like what we had at our shooting party in November." Is this sentence is really correct?
A short answer: yes, This nGram shows is very much like to be more common currently than is very like, but before 1940 the reverse was the case.
In answer to your supplemental question (How to determine which form to use?), my recommendation would be to invest in a good grammar of English usage* to learn about general patterns, and run an nGram as above on specific instances (or do a simple Google search on the two phrases: for example "is very like" gets 411,000 hits, while "is very much like" gets 36 million - so it is clear which is the preferred form).
*The two books I consulted in preparing this answer were Swan's Practical English Usage and Collins Cobuild English Usage.
I disagree that they are the same.
In my mind, "get one's head around" is about conceptual problems, whereas "get one's arms around" is about more physical things or actually "doing" stuff.
For example, I might say "I'm having problems getting my head around this task." meaning that I'm struggling to conceptually understand what I'm doing.
On the other hand, I might say "I'm having problems getting my arms around this task." meaning that I'm struggling to complete the actual task (but not because I don't understand).
As you can see, the distinction I draw is not a bright line in the sand, but I would say that it's consistent with how I've seen it used.
Best Answer
There may be a transatlantic difference here. The Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that ‘around’ is used almost nine times more than ‘round’. The British National Corpus shows ‘around’ to be used less than one and a half times as much as ‘round’. The OED suggests that ‘around’ might have originally been a British English usage, and that it is now returning under influence from American English. Anyway, the OED shows them to be synonymous.