Can't quite figure this out, so thought I'd ask one of the 301 gurus here ~

What is the proper way to redirect all the pages in a particular
subdirectory to the homepage using a 301 without doing a 301 for each page
separately?

For instance, every page in
http://www.example.com/something/ would redirect to http://www.example.com
(where one would find a note that the /something/ part of the site
unfortunately no longer exists).

I tried this:

RedirectPermanent /something/ http://www.example.com/

and it works perfectly when someone types in
http://www.example.com/something - it redirects to http://www.example.com

But when someone goes to
http://www.example.com/something/particularpage.html it redirects to
www.example.com/particularpage.html when I want it just to redirect to
http://www.example.com

I know I can do a separate 301 for each page in the /something/ directory -
but that would take a lot of time & space, so I'm hoping there's a more
elegant solution.

Sure there's something elementary I'm missing - hoping someone can set me
straight.

Thanks!
Denise