A note on forests (Recruitment)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 13:42 (2583 days ago) @ RaichuKFM

Unlike most of the examples, forests are something I do use inside with, pretty commonly. Why is that? I don't think it's a flawed native speaker intuition.

No, I think it's that as a kid, there were forests around. At the least, woods. But they were all bordering farmland, roads, or the like. So they were closely cropped, with definite treelines. Stories talked about forests as big, sprawling things.

Being inside one just makes sense to me, on a level beyond "being inside the plains" or something. Same with cities, which I never went to often at all as a child but knew as dots on a map and scenes of sprawling buildings.

If anything is a culprit, here, it's the boundary having been built into my concept of the thing from the start. There's also how I rationalize spaces and boundaries, but if we're talking basic concepts built into early understandings...