In the sentence “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”, the word ‘single’ describes the word ‘step’, and sets it apart from the many other implied steps. But what antonym of ‘single’ can be used to describe all the other steps?
Online Thesauruses keep coming back with the word “together”, which is definitely not what I’m looking for. Other suggestions given to me are grouping words like ‘double’ and ‘multiple’, but those don’t fit either. I’m looking for a word which in a sense conveys fungibility, being a member of a large plurality. A word I can use to define a lake in terms of individual drops of water:
“We went boating on _____ drops of water.”
So far the best term I’ve been able to come up with is n, and that has the shortcomings of being a) highly variable b) obscure c) unpoetic.
Bwahahaha! Oh my god I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons where Homer listened to a vocabulary improvement tape and forgot the word “spoon”.
I’m not sure if it’ll work but it’s very close. I’m going to go try and use it and see how it sounds. Thank you.
EDIT: This is especially funny considering I used the word “many” in the second sentence of my OP.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
It continues with {the rest of the} {all the other} {multiple} {manifold} {myriad} {zillions of} steps.
I think the problem is that you have many one-word choices meaning “a large number of,” but we don’t have one word meaning “∞-1” if that’s the option you want.
Dr. Drake, thank you, those are illuminating suggestions. “all of the other steps” is one of the phrases I have been trying to make work, so even though I don’t quite get your last sentence I’m pretty sure you’ve understood the essence of what I’m going for.
At the moment I’m toying with “The Many Steps”. FYI, this is supposed to be a title, although it may just end up as a caption.
In the context of the journey beginning with a single step, the remaining steps could be referred to as, well, “the remaining steps.” I don’t think it’s what you’re looking for, but it’s another way of viewing the n-1 steps after the first has been taken.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; it continues with countless more steps, each significant and insignificant in and of itself, with only the last step truly comparable in significance to the first.
“Countless” may not be perfect, but it implies enough that it would fit the OP’s sample sentence, IMHO. To me it means a number in between “incredibly large” and “infinte.”
If you’re willing to use two separate words used together, you have a great many choices.
Or a near infinite number of choices.
Or an unimaginable quantity of choices.
Or more choices than you could shake a stick at.
Guys, thanks for all the suggestions! I’m surprised by the number of variations for writing it with mathematical notation; the version I tried was “Step n+1”.
In terms of meaning, one of the issues I am having is that I want to make a point that the remaining steps are no less significant, and so any term that defines them simply as “not the first one” seems to run counter to this. Kind of like the way “leftovers” is an inherently pejorative term.
