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everyone!

I need some help with the following:

  1. He didn't tell me his secret and I was curious to know that I made up my mind to find it out with him. >>> Why is with used here? Is it possible to say from?

  2. She lay awake all night thinking ____ what had happened. The answer which is given in the book is of. Why can't we use about (if it's implied that she had given some thoughts to the matter bafore)?

  3. She felt that Jean had taken against her ____ the very start. The answers here are in and from. I understand 'FROM' but 'IN'?

Thanks a lot!

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    The Book is obviously wrong. There are a lot of such books around. Most of them have the idea that there is only one way to say something, and every word is determined -- one word wrong or out of place and you'll catch cancer. This is not so; there are millions of ways to say anything, and many prepositions can get used. Some of the choices the book gives here are, to say the least, odd. Was The Book published in the twentieth century? How about the nineteenth?
    – John Lawler
    Feb 3, 2015 at 18:22
  • In general, questions like this are probably better suited for ell.stackexchange.com (English Language Learners). However, in this case I would agree that these examples are odd, and that your versions are closer to standard usage than the given answers.
    – Chris Sunami
    Feb 3, 2015 at 18:24
  • For the first two examples, your suggested versions are better. The third example is hopelessly bad.
    – Greg Lee
    Feb 3, 2015 at 18:33
  • The examples here read like some of the examples from Fractured English as She Is Spoke, a (renamed for comic effect) nineteenth-century guide to English for Portuguese speakers by an author whose grasp of English was extremely weak.
    – Sven Yargs
    Feb 3, 2015 at 18:38
  • In example 2, either of or about could almost equally be used, with similar meaning. In number 3. from is the correct choice, in is NOT a possibility, but you could use at, which would have a different meaning to from. As others have noted, the rest is nonsense.
    – WS2
    Feb 3, 2015 at 18:46

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  1. "To find it out with him" just doesn't make sense unless he doesn't know his own secret either, and the two of you discover it together. Even if that were the case the sentence would still be pretty awkward.

  2. You can use about, both are equally correct.

  3. "In the very start", sounds a bit odd. In fact the whole sentence sounds very odd. "Taken against her" is either very posh or a bit archaic, I can't decide which, but it's definitely not something you'd hear in everyday English.

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