Often when you look up words in a dictionary, certain sentence patterns and collocations are often given in a kind of ‘genericised’ way, where animate noun phrases are replaced by somebody and inanimate ones by something (and verbal phrases usually by do something). For example, a definition of help might have the following:
[someone] helps [someone] [do something]
– which can be turned into a ‘real’ sentence by replacing the ‘genericised placeholders’ with more meaningful phrases:
[I] help [you] [clean your house]
I quite like this kind of ‘genericising’ and find it elegant and useful. However, someone and something here are used only for noun phrases (and verb phrases), and I haven’t been able to find a way of ‘genericising’ adjectival phrases. For example, a definition of find may have the following:
[someone] finds [somebody/something] [adjective]
=> [I] find [it] [very interesting]
Adjective there doesn’t seem like a very good choice, since it just expresses a word class, not a ‘genericisation’—that is, it is the counterpart to ‘noun’, ‘verb’, rather than the counterpart to ‘someone’, ‘[do] something’.
Is there an established way of ‘genericising’ adjectives that fits this general pattern?
Answer
I would use somehow as a generic placeholder in that case. It means "in some way or manner", which gets at what an adjective does while maintaining the some- concordance.
[someone] finds [somebody/something] [somehow]
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