Common English Blunders

Prepositions Gone Missing

Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Prepositions

Yesterday I wrote about days that I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Wild”.

Today I want to discuss the complement to this: what I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Missing”.

Again, I have to wonder when, where, why, and how American instruction about English prepositions went astray.

There seems to be a growing trend for many Americans to omit necessary prepositions.

And this trend seems to be consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. Omitting prepositions is simpler than including them.

The “Prepositions Gone Missing” label applies to any of these expressions:

  • “arrived home”
  • “graduated high school”
  • “graduated college”
  • “graduated university”

I wrote a blog post more than a year ago about “graduated college”. Similar discussions would apply for “graduated high school” and “graduated university”.

The travel-related use of the verb “arrive” requires a preposition between the verb and the destination.

Just as one does not “arrive the Moon” or “arrive England”, one does not “arrive home”.

Instead, one “arrives on the Moon”, “arrives in England”, or “arrives at home”.

Have you noticed any other common expressions with necessary prepositions that have been omitted? Please contact me, and I will write about them here!

Prepositions Gone Wild

Common English Blunders, Prepositions

Some days I can barely contain myself.

Those are the days that I like to label as “Prepositions Gone Wild”.

As with the barely-legal women who flaunt more than they should in the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, it seems that many Americans like to flaunt more prepositions than they should.

When, where, why, and how did American instruction about prepositions go astray?

In particular, why are so many Americans prone to inserting extraneous prepositions into their speech and writing? How did they learn to do this? When and where did this happen? Were they absent that day from school? Did they not get the memo?

A “Prepositions Gone Wild” day is a day that I hear at least two of these phrases:

  • “for free”
  • “on yesterday”
  • “on today”
  • “on tomorrow”
  • “where at“

Here is a blog post about each of the above phrases:

Have you noticed any other common phrases with extraneous prepositions? Please contact me, and I will write about them here!

“They dotted-line report back to Becky.”

Adverbs, Common English Blunders, Self-negation, Verbs

I overheard this yesterday.

Problem:
The adverb “back” in “report back” is redundant.

Explanation:
The verb “report” comes from the Latin verb “reportare”, which means to carry back.

So the meaning of “report back” would be to carry back back.

Because the “re” in “report” means back, one could argue that those who “report back” would never reach their intended audience.

For fun, I searched Google for the expression “report back” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 3,740,000 matches.

This is depressing.

Solution:
“They dotted-line report to Becky.”