2021-05-11 ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – A – at
2021-05-11
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน ชุด – A – at
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Dictionary.com
ออกเสียง at = ‘at’ - unstressed =‘uht’
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Usage Notes
'Arrive At' vs. 'Arrive To': A Very Nerdy Analysis
Hold on tight and we'll arrive to? at? a conclusion safely.
What to Know
Though it's far more common to say that
one "arrives at" a destination, since the second decade of the 21st century
it's been increasinglycommon to say that one "arrives to" a destination.
Many verbs have a particular preposition or two
that they like to pal around with.
You wink at someone, for example, and sing to them.
Just which preposition
a given verb preferscan be incredibly difficult
for a non-nativespeaker to master,
but native speakers learn them without thinking.
Native speakers also noticewhen a verb shows up
with an unfamiliarpreposition hanging on its elbow.
'Arrive At' or 'Arrive To'?
And so it is that our curiosity was piqued
when we noticed arrive appearing in contexts
having to do with reachinga destination not with its usual partner at,
but with to instead.
The trend is real: while English speakers have been
saying “I arrived at the party a bit late” for centuries,
they’re increasinglysaying “I arrived to the party a bit late” as well.
It turns out that arrive to is very old.
The Oxford English Dictionary
includes an example of the collocation from 1539,
when the word was a babe of merely a century and change.
The OED also reportsthat arrive with to
(as well as with into) is now obsolete.
If that was indeed the case for a while, it no longer is:
while arrive at (a destination) is far more common,
arrive to has been seeing increased use for all of the current century
and especially sincethe late 2010s.
People who careabout these sorts of things
(there are at least several of us) have historically criticized “arrive to."
Our earliest knowledge of such disapproval was Robert Baker’s 1770 injunction against“arrive to” for literal senses of the word
(he approved of “arrive at” for literal uses
and either “arrive at” or “arrive to” for figurative ones).
Later commentators made assertions along the same lines.
So then, to summarize
where we have, ahem, arrived as of this point in our exploration:
arrive to was common enough to be criticized from the late 18th century, rare enough to be identified as obsolete in the late 20th century,
and common enoughagain in the second decade of the 21st century
to be notedby lexicographers (such as yours truly) again.
It all makes us very curiousabout these words.
To satisfy that curiosity,
we’re going to dig down into some of the deeper realms of word nerdery, with the aid of a magnificent tome called
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language,
by linguists Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech,
and Jan Svartvik.
Transitionaland Punctual
According to Quirk et al.,
the verb arrive
(or, to be more precise, the situation type it applies to) is transitional:
this means that,
as with such wordsas drop, take off, sit down, and die,
it isconclusive and punctual.
“Conclusive” meansthat there is a change of state;
thecategory contrasts with “nonconclusive,”
thedesignation for verbs like sneeze, flash, and nod,
which do not imply a change of state.
A verb that is“punctual” is not “durative”;
durativeverbs like drink and snow and improve
take placeover a usually brief period of time,
while the punctualverb situation happens and is over:
one arrives and that’s it—you’re there.
Position vs. DestinationPreposition
As for at and to,
the prepositions we’re examining as the partners of arrive,
they belong to twodifferent preposition categories.
Prepositions express relational meanings,
and these particularprepositions
express relational meanings having to do with space
(as opposed totime or cause, for example).
Quirk et al.
classify at asa preposition of position:
likeprepositional phrases with on and in,
when at headsa prepositional phrase,
the phrase is typically about being in a fixed location
that is eithera point, a line or surface, or an area or volume.
Meanwhile, to is classified (along with onto and into)
as a preposition of destination:
the phrase it headsis typically about going to a fixed location
that is also eithera point, a line or surface, or an area or volume.
Ourparticular prepositions of interest both involve the single point.
[Skip this part ifa)
these distinctions are quite clear now, thank you very much,
and/or b)
preposition are swelland all, but omg, please no.
Quirk et al.have a set of examples that clarify it all.
Consider:
My car is at the cottage. —> cottage as dimensionless point
Our cottage is on that road. —> road as a line or surface
There is some ice on that road. —> road as surface
There is a new roof on the cottage. —> cottage as surface
There are only two beds in the cottage. —> cottage as area or volume
and:
The cows are in the field. —> field as closed space, i.e., area or volume
but then:
We walked on the beach. —> beach as surface
Fascinating, right? We think so too.]
In sentences like “I arrived at the party a bit late”
and “I arrived to the party a bit late,” the party is a dimensionless point.
(Yes, we’re sorry: even your party with the invigorating playlist and the impressive fondue.)
Prepositions of position, such as at, can accompany most verbs,
but they are usually associated with verbs of stative meaning
—words like be and live (e.g., “I am at home,” “I live on Main Street”).
Arrive, it must be noted, is not such a verb.
Prepositions of destination, such as to,
usually accompany dynamic motional verbs like go, move, fly
(e.g., “I went into the store,” “She flew to Vegas”).
Gosh, those verbs sure seem similar to arrive. Hmm.
And so it is that we arrive here:
after all this investigation into the semantics
ofthe verb arrive and the prepositions at and to,
we find that
what has been the usual preposition accompanying arrive
incollocations having to do with destinations for centuries
is seeing
what may be a rising challenger
that is arguably semantically more appropriate.
In news publications, which ostensibly tend to feature
writing by trained writers who pay attention to style guides
and may even have editors who fine-tune their work, “arrive at the scene” continues to be far more common than “arrive to the scene,”
but the latter is increasingly used, and has seen significantly
increased use over the course of the second decade of the 21st century.
The same is true of the collocations
“arrive into town” and “arrive onto the scene”:
they both feature prepositions of destination,
and they’re both on the increase.
Given all this, we can only arrive to the conclusion that
English is always full of surprises.
(We can still of course arrive at that conclusion as well.)
Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Words We're Watching
Don't @ Us
How the @ symbol can start a Twitter war
Update: This word was added in September 2020.
If you've spent any time on Twitter,
you're familiar with @, the at sign.
While @ has had many uses over time
(such as in unit pricing, e.g., "20 pencils @ 5 cents apiece"),
we usually associate contemporary use of the symbol
with the Internet and social media.
Ray Tomlinson, the programmer who developed
what became e-mailin 1971, is credited with
selecting the @ symbol to direct messages to a user
at a particular domain, as in [email protected].
As the symbol became a convenient shorthand device
necessitated by its 140-character limit,
Twitter eventually incorporated it
asa function for users to tweet at one another.
Now, Twitter users are typically identified by their @-prefixed handles, like @MerriamWebster.
Other social media platforms, such as Instagram,
have similarly incorporated the @ sign for tagging users.
In Twitter parlance,
the tagging of another user
by prefacing that user's name with the @ symbol is called a mention.
Users who are the subject of mentions
receive notifications from the service that they have been tagged.
The mention can bea direct reply to that person,
or in some instances, a passing mention of that person
to a different userfor which the mentioned person will still be notified,
an action viewed by some as passive-aggressive.
Such uses of @ have spawned a phrase: "don't @ me,"
or, spelled out, "don't at me," with at serving as a verb.
On Twitter, the phrase is used as a warning
not to respond to, annoy, or argue with the original poster
about what that poster has just stated:
Use of "don’t @ me" has become so prevalent, in fact,
that the American Dialect Society
named the verb at its 2016 Word of the Year in the Digital category, edging out tweetstorm.
Familiarity with verbal at eventually reached the point
where it broke free from the boundaries of Twitter
and found its way into edited full-text articles:
The First 'Transformers' Isn't Terrible: Don't @ Me
— Headline, Decider, 20 Jun 2017
Argue all you want. I've already made up my mind
—I'll wear shorts to work until the day I die. Don't you dare @ me.
— MJ Franklin, Mashable, 13 June 2017
Thirty-three years. It's been thirty-three years
since a female superhero has anchored her own movie
—1984's Supergirl being the most recent example.
(Catwoman and Elektra? Both antiheroes. Don't @ me.)
— Graeme McMillan, Wired, 5 June 2017
Soft serve is really all it takes to make me happy.
I am a woman of simple pleasures. Sugar, dairy, carbohydrates. Don’t @ me, as I think people say.
— Emma Straub, Grub Street, 16 June 2017
Now, I’m as liberal as they come, so don’t at me.
There’s no doubt here who I voted for, and I am one with Carole Radziwill and Carole Radziwill is one with me.
— Lindsay Denninger, Bustle, 3 May 2017
With this expanded, extra-Twitterial use,
at as a verb shows a shift in meaning
fromthe functional sense of
"to send a tweet directly to" or "to mention in a tweet"
to a more general sense meaning something along the lines of
"to respond to, challenge, or disparage the claim or opinion of another."
While there is scant evidence in edited text,
Twitter usage of the spelled-out at
seems to prefer the past tense and present participle forms are atted and atting.
Questioning our tenses? Don't you dare @ us.
Collins COBUILD English Usage
At
1. place or position
At is used to talk about where something is
or where something happens.
There was a staircase at the end of the hallway.
You often use at to mean 'next to' or 'beside'.
He waited at the door.
You say that someone sits at a table or desk.
I was sitting at my desk, reading.
If you want to mention the building where something is
or where something happens, you usually use at.
We had dinner at a restaurant in Attleborough.
He lived at 14 Burnbank Gardens, Glasgow.
In BritishEnglish,
you say that someone is at school or at university
when you want to say that they study there.
He had done some acting at school.
After a year at university, Ben joined the army.
Speakers of AmericanEnglish usually say that someone is in school.
They met in high school.
You say that something happens at a meeting, ceremony, or party.
The whole family were at the funeral.
They met at a dinner party.
2. time
At is also used to say when something happens.
You use at when you are mentioning a precise time.
At 2.30 a.m. he returned.
The train leaves at 9 a.m
.
If you want to knowthe precise time
whensomething happened or will happen,
you can say 'At what time...?'
butpeople usually say 'What time...'' or 'When...?'
When does the boat leave?
'We're having a party on the beach.' – 'What time?' – 'At nine.'
You can say that something happened
or will happen 'at dawn', 'at dusk', or 'at night'.
She had come in at dawn.
It was ten o'clock at night.
However, you say that something happened
or will happen 'in the morning', 'in the afternoon', or 'in the evening'.
If something happens at a meal time,
it happens while the meal is being eaten.
Let's talk about it at dinner.
You say that something happens at Christmas or at Easter.
She sent a card at Christmas.
However, you say that something happens
on a particular day during Christmas or Easter.
They played cricket on Christmas Day.
In BritishEnglish, at is usually used with weekend.
I went home at the weekend.
American speakersusually use on or over with weekend.
I had a class on the weekend.
What are you doing over the weekend?
Dictionary of Problem Words in English
At & at about & at all
At is a preposition and requires an object.
One should not ask “Where are you staying at?
But “What motel are you staying at?”
or better. “At what motel are you staying?”
At isunnecessary
in expression such as at about and at around.
At all,meaning “to the slightest degree,”
is nonstandardwhen used in a statement
such as “They were thoughtless at all.”
When usedto mean “wholly” or “completely,”
at all should be replaced by of all:
“Sue is the finest girl of all.”
Common Errors In English Usage Dictionary
At all
Some of us are irritatedwhen a grocery checker asks
“Do you want any help out with that at all?”
“At all” is traditionally used in negative contexts:
“Can’t you give me any help at all?”
The current patternof using the phrase in positive offers of help
unintentionally suggests aid reluctantly given or minimal in extent.
As a wayof making yourself sound less polite than you intend,
it ranks right up there with “no problem” instead of “you’re welcome.”
Dictionary of Problem Words in English
At & in
These two prepositions are
among the most used wordsin the language;
“look at her,” “at the door,”
“at night,” “at the party,” “at noon,”
“atthe controls,” “at peace”;
“inthe rain,” “in the moment,”
“struck in the leg,” “in cash,” “in control,” “in fear,” “inhaste.”
But can these two words be used interchangeably?
If you are a native speaker of English, your sense of idiom will not fail you:
you will say “I am all at sea” but “Whale live in the sea.”
And yet, do you arrive in or at a city?
An airplane arrives at its destination, but does it arrive in or ata city?
Is there a distinction between reaching a place and arrivingat a place and then entering it?
No clear rules can be stated for the use of these words.
Let your ear and your sense of idiom be your guides.
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