Talk:anyone

of anyone: “compared to any single”

Anyone is often used in place of the traditionally correct (and more logical) everyone in sentences like She is the most intelligent person of anyone I know. 64 percent rejected it in our 1964 ballot, and 60 percent in 2001. But the tide has turned: in our 2017 ballot, the Usage Panel accepted it 55 percent to 45 percent, while rejecting the supposedly correct alternative She is the most intelligent person of everyone I know 69 percent to 31 percent. Presumably an idiomatic reading, “compared to any single person I know,” outweighs the literal reading “out of all the people I know.” The implication of a one-by-one mental comparison may explain why the expression survives despite the fact that of anyone/everyone can be omitted altogether.
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=anyone

--Backinstadiums (talk) 09:26, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

None remembered any one thing he’d said.

How should any one be analyzed here? --Backinstadiums (talk) 21:27, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

For things other than people?

"ANYONE of a number of factors" [1] (first sentence of the article by Miller on page 835). I guess this could also be interpreted as an erroneous form of "any one"; in any case, should it be documented here? 70.172.194.25 08:04, 16 February 2022 (UTC)