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Anything - In Public Interest

"Anything" is not a simile, neither a metaphor...

When we use a sentence of the form  'A verb like B' then B is often used to site an example to support the verb, or to indicate the degree of a verb more like an adverb e.g. ate like a pig, grew like a giant. Anything is not an example of anything.


So phrases like 'Drove like anything', 'Ate like anything', 'Grew like anything' do not make sense. When people use such phrases anything is used in place of something voracious, fast or rapid.
According to dictionary.com Anything means 1) something no matter what, 2) any how or in any degree... [1]
Lets take the last phrase, 'grew like anything'. If we replace anything by any how, it will read 'grew like something no matter what', or 'grew like any how', which would mean grew in any manner (if we ignore the like), or rather would imply in a disorderly manner (if we talk about speed, we would expect the growth to alternate between fast and slow), it in no way suggests anything about the rate of growth.

Use superlative degrees of adverbs over examples (especially when you cant think of any)
'He/she drove very fast', or 'He/she drove like a speed-racer', He/she ate voraciously, or he/she ate like a pig. It grew rapidly, or it grew voraciously.

Just reiterating- "Anything is not an example of anything"


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