we learned an interesting thing today: apparently the reason it's common for non-native english speakers to use "sth" to mean "something", and vanishingly rare for native english speakers to do so, is because the abbreviation is used by native speakers almost exclusively in *dictionaries*, which non-native speakers use very frequently and native speakers much less frequently
the reason it's used in dictionaries is purely space constraints. print dictionaries are Big.
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@Felthry interesting
I mean, I didn't learn it from a dictionary but rather from a textbook but same thing really
I don't abbreviate someone as so. though
@noiob I would guess, assuming that abbreviation is similarly common in dictionaries/textbooks (we've never seen it though), that it's less likely to enter common use just because of namespace conflicts: there's the word so and SO (significant other) in very common usage that would be easy to confuse with it if it was used
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@Felthry I don't think I knew about SO until way after I learnt most English
it's pretty common in definitions, yeah… do you not use English dictionaries from time to time?
@noiob only rarely, and not usually for phrases where that would show up
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@noiob if we see an unfamiliar phrase, it's usually slang and would be easier to just ask the person who said it what it means than to find a dictionary that bothers to include this specific slang
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@Felthry huh!
I (used to?) use "s/t" for "something" a lot, but nobody knew what I meant so I was wondering if I had just pulled it out of thin air or s/t
I read dictionaries a lot as a kid but I don't recall if I encountered "sth" there
🇲🇽
@Felthry
You learn sth new every day 😛
the word something is common in dictionaries because it's used as a placeholder when a phrase being defined needs an object in the middle of it, but that object can vary, such as "turn (something) on"; they use the abbreviation to save space in these
-F