"Some": an emergent article?

[cema]

Was in a cafe today, heard the waiter say: "I will be back with some menu".

Normal usage to me, but a friend (lives outside of the US) was amused. Like, will she just choose a random menu? Anyway, it does seem that "some" is often taking place of "a" in spoken American English. But does it qualify as an article? I wonder if linguists have anything to say about this.

Comments

Re: Explanation

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grisha/]

I agree with you entirely on the point of elementary textbooks vs. the real thing (which, however, might be found in a more advanced text on sociolinguistics or whatnot), though I'd like to mention that I am not referring to any textbook here, but purely to my analysis of English as I hear it. In fact, it seems to me, purely from thinking about it, that mingling the meanings of "some" for countable and uncountable nouns would produce results that make no sense, ranging from "I will be back with an arbitrary amount of menu" to "I will be back with a random water."

[cema.livejournal.com]

That last thing is what caused me to post this in the first place. Because I have actually heard it.