Fulltext search against table column in MySQL

I am trying to do a full text search in which the query should check to see if the term in a column in one table exists in a list of terms in a column on another DB. Something along the lines of $query="SELECT this,that,somethingelse FROM some_table,another_table WHERE MATCH (another_table.list) AGAINST (somethingelse)" ; This results in the error: "wrong arguments to AGAINST" Clearly I could do this as two queries, the first to select the term in "somethingelse" and save it in a variable and the second to search against that term. But the query(ies) will run through 100s or more rows, so if I could do it in a singel query it would be so much more elegant. Thanks! Jeffrey