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.
-F
Follow
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
