Anything

I would not do it for anything.

Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language […] his clerks […] understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.

In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%.

Perhaps it was this atmosphere of misplacedness and loneliness as much as anything which led her to speak to him one evening in early summer when the office had closed.

How long does it take to turn you actors into good anythings?

So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi.

He wasn't cooking, he wasn't sweeping, he wasn't anythinging!

–I don't want to accompany him! –You never want to anything him!