Attributes that make some words ‘shades of meaning’ of other words

IF you’ve ever wondered but never bothered to check what “shades of meaning” precisely means, you should get a good idea from an exchange I had recently with a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum.

Justine Agustines, an Education sophomore who proudly calls himself “forever a student of the English language,” asked: “What do you mean by shades of meaning in language? Can we use the identical clauses of this sentence as examples: ‘I cannot always choose what happens to me, I can always choose what happens in me.’ How do the italicized prepositions change the essence of the clauses?”