My worries turned to none/nothing

Question

My worries turned to none.

My worries turned to nothing.

Are both these sentences stated correctly? I think the first one might be wrong due to the definitions of none, but it doesn't sound too bad to me. I mean, I get the idea it is trying to address, however the second sentence does appear to sound more solid to me.

I tried replacing "turned to" with "became" to see how that would sound, but still I cannot deduce anything else from that.

Do both the sentences make sense? If so, does one make sense more than the other (if that makes sense)?

Answer 1

My worries turned to none.
My worries turned to nothing.

A fluent speaker would be most unlikely to use either of these sentences, and this is supported by a search using Google Ngrams which returns no result for any construction of the form [worry/worries] [turn+inflection] to [none/nothing].

I suspect this is because we instinctively think of "turn to" as requiring a thing that the subject becomes, and the null outcome "nothing" or "none" seems less suitable in this kind of expression. We would also tend to use "turn into" when we mean "become", since "turn to" can mean changing one's orientation towards something (not counting idiomatic expressions like turn to stone or feet turned to clay).

Instead, we would be likely to use a metaphor that captures the sense of something "turning into nothing", such as:

My worries evaporated.
My worries dissolved.
My worries disappeared.

Google Ngrams gives many examples of these three verbs in the format worries [past-tense], with "worries disappeared" having the highest frequency in the corpus:

Answer 2

The closest thing in idiomatic English is "came to nothing" or "came to naught", as in:

All my efforts came to naught

or

I wanted to learn tenacity, but it came to nothing.

You could say:

My worries came to nothing

but the phrase "came to nothing" implies that there was an expected effect that didn't occur. By saying "my worries came to nothing", you are saying that you expected your worries to actually cause the problems you were worried about, but it didn't happen.

If that's what you intend to say, then great! This would be a very nice way to say it. If that's not what you intend to say, though, then say something else.

Maybe you mean:

My worries were for nothing