Prepositions

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!

“… wait for you …” vs. “… wait on you …”

Common English Blunders, Prepositions, Verbs, Versus

I often hear one of these expressions when the other one is required.

Problem:
These two expressions are not synonyms.

Explanation:
My wife recently heard a man say, “I will wait on you in the car.”

The preposition “on” bothered her, and we discussed how frequently each of us has heard “wait on” when “wait for” was required.

The common English blunder seems to be to use a form of “wait on” when a form of “wait for” is required.

Someone who “waits on” someone else is acting as a waiter or waitress.

So “I will wait on you in the car.” literally means “I will act as your waiter (or waitress) in the car.”

The man whom my wife heard should have said “I will wait for you in the car.” because that person was not saying that he would act as a waiter in “the car”.

Solution:
Use “… wait on you …” when you are a waiter or waitress; otherwise use “… wait for you …”.

“swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”

Common English Blunders, Prepositions, Verbs

I heard this expression last evening on a Travel Channel television program.

Problems:
1. The verbs are incorrect.
2. A preposition is missing.

Explanation:
The TV program was reviewing night life in Las Vegas.

One of the featured locations was a night club in which performers sit and stand on swings hung from the ceiling.

The narrator claimed that an exciting feature was that the club had “swings that raise and lower from the ceiling”.

The first problem is that the verbs “raise” and “lower” are transitive verbs — that is, verbs that require both a direct subject and one or more objects — whereas intransitive verbs — that is, verbs that do not take an object — are required here.

Examples of transitive verbs include “cut” and “hit” and “put”.

Examples of intransitive verbs include “die” and “rot” and “sit”.

“Swings that raise and lower from the ceiling” requires intransitive verbs, and “rise” and “fall” are the appropriate corrections to “raise” and “lower”, respectively.

These corrections give us “swings that rise and fall from the ceiling”.

I believe that this use of “raise” and “lower” as intransitive verbs is connected to the use of “lay” as an intransitive verb — as in “Please lay down now!” — through a popular but incorrect assumption that transitive verbs are interchangeable with intransitive verbs.

The second problem is a lack of parallelism. It makes no sense to say “rise from the ceiling”, so the first and second verbs may not share the preposition “from”.

Instead, the verb “rise” requires its own preposition in relation to “the ceiling”. That required preposition is “to”.

I believe that the omission of “to” after the first verb is related to the common English blunder of omitting all prepositions but the final one in a list of verbs in a sentence. My impression is that this blunder comes from speakers and writers not thinking ahead, perhaps because they were not taught about the importance of parallelism in sentences.

Solution:
“swings that rise to and fall from the ceiling”