Semantics

A few years ago, I was visiting friends in Germany. One of them is an English teacher and she asked me if I could explain to her the difference between "fill in" and "fill out". She gave an example, "Would you say 'I want to fill in the form'? or 'I want to fill out the form'?" I tried to imagine the situation. At the doctor or dentist's office, they hand you that clipboard with all the info you have to verify and say, "Please fill out the form." Ok, so "fill out", but "fill in" sounded just as right. On a test, it might say "Fill in all the blanks." So, I decided that the difference had to do with what was expected from the writer. To "fill out" seems to be to put in all the necessary information--to complete a form or provide information. To "fill in" seems to be to put back what has been taken out or removed. If there are obvious gaps in something, you fill them in. But if there are gaps and you need not complete all of them, you fill them out. Thoughts?

Anyway, little language nuances like this are typically brought to my attention by my interactions with multi-lingual people, primarily people trying to learn English and make sense of what we say. I have often found that non-native speakers say and write the most amazing things--things that would be impossible for natives to write or say.

For example, the sentence that inspired me this evening, "The photographer caught my ugly moment, so the picture of me didn’t look good." Amazing! "The photographer caught my ugly moment" is such a beautiful phrase, and such an interesting way to explain a bad photo. Was the expression ugly? The moment? Was the person experiencing something bad? Or was it just a case like when you hit pause on a TV show and the actor on screen happens to have his/her eyes closed, neck swelled, lips oddly arranged in an emerging gesture of speech--the ugliness of a moment that we don't see in our sense of meaning and context.

I told the student that her grammar was correct. Technically, there's nothing wrong with that sentence. It's just that no English-speaker would say that. We would say "The photographer caught me at an ugly moment". The difference? We would separate ourselves from the ugly moment. In the student's version, the ugly moment belongs to the speaker; it is part of him/her. In our common expression, the ugly moment is a thing that happens, and completely distinct from the self of the speaker. I wonder if it is just English that makes this kind of distinction? And is it only with photographs? Are we always trying to separate ourselves from the ugliness of our experience or being? Probably not. I'm sure that some of our expressions do make some negatives personal. But I love how this one doesn't and how this student brought that small detail to my attention.