"at" at the end of a where phrase

[Beverly Flanigan]

What on earth does this "great phrase" mean?  And where are the
"errors"?  I know almost no one who says "FebRuary either.  Since good
writing has almost nothing to do with how one speaks, it's too bad you feel
proud of the first aspect of your linguistic life and ashamed of the second.

I too had a teacher who taught us how to analyze Latin-based words (a
useful tool I wish my grad students had), do library research and write
decent papers (another skill often lacking), and appreciate good
literature.  But when she tore down a sign at a bake sale during a
basketball game because it said "Boughten Cookies," she shamed us and our
origins.  It was years later, of course, that I learned 'boughten' is a
common Northern participial adjective and felt vindicated.

Another member of the erring "distinguished folk":

Beverly Olson Flanigan
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701


At 05:35 PM 12/6/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>Too bad if it IS taking off!  My 5th grade teacher, Miss Smith, for whom I
>am now eternally grateful, explained that the correct answer to "Where are
>you at?" or "Where are you going to?" was "between the a and the t, or the
>t and the o," which ever applied.  It was a great phrase to use among
>ourselves, but I have grown increasingly careful about using it now . . .
>when even distinguished folk make the errors.
>
>Miss Smith had two goals in life -- to make her Texas students sound less
>like they came from Texas (no grammatical errors like those above, no
>pitcher frames, no liberries where we went to for the books, and never
>Febuerry or Massatusetts.)  Don't know where she was from, but she was at
>least adamant about these.  Her second goal was to produce a generation or
>two of writers, and here I think that she succeeded!
>
>Julia Niebuhr Eulenberg <eulenbrg at u.washington.edu>