"at" at the end of a where phrase

[J. Eulenberg]

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>