Ah, “I judge you when you use poor grammar.“, grandest of all Facebook groups! How many of my friends you’ve lured in with your siren song of mockery! What an important niche you’ve filled, at last allowing college students to feel superior to others, salvaging their fragile self-esteem!
All right, enough of my sanctimony. I, like everyone else, judge people when they use non-standard grammar. I like to think that my judgements consist solely of determining the group with which the person identifies themself. For instance, I recognize that the Boost Mobile tagline “Where you at?” is intended to relate to urban culture, whereas my use of the obscure word “sanctimony” at the start of this paragraph is intended to identify myself with the well-educated and -cultured, so that people will accept the anti-authoritarian things I write about grammar. (This use of obscure words is a common tactic of grammatical snobs, along with liberal use of Latin phrases.) Alas, even us linguists sometimes find it difficult to not to end up biased against opinions of writers whose writing is peppered with grammatical improprieties — as witnessed by my previous rant against the Third World Challenge. But even then, at least linguists try to only judge people because of honestly poor grammar, not ipse dixit poor grammar (you see what I mean about Latin phrases?).
So yes, I’m against “I judge you when you use poor grammar.”, largely because half of the so-called errors aren’t errors at all. Of course, that’s also the group’s redeeming quality for my purposes; it is a treasure trove of ill-justified grammatical opinions screaming out to be corrected. Witness, for instance, this pleasant exchange from a few mornings ago:
Terry: What is exactly the problem with “Where are you at?” I mean, the sentence can make sense without the “at” but is it really wrong to include the “at”?
Kate: I can’t believe you actually need to ask that?
Yes, for shame, Terry! Do you not understand that at in Where are you at? is a self-evident abomination? Cast him into the pits, etc., etc.! Except, wait, why is this usage incorrect again? I looked around the Internet, and while I found a lot of people saying it was wrong, I found next to no one justifying it. A brief sampling of the arguments I did find:
- Why can’t you just say “Where are you?” Having “at” at the end does nothing for the sentence, and the sentence cannot be retooled to make sense while including “at.” (link)
- Burchfield refers to “Where are you at?” as a tautologous regional usage. Clearly, we’re better off without the “at.” (link)
- A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with but the “at” in “Where are you at?” (or “At where are you?”) is just incorrect. (link)
(Burchfield, by the way, is the editor of the New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which happens to presently be sitting on the corner of my bed. I looked it up, and he doesn’t justify his proclamation any more than anyone else does. Now that’s ipsedixitism!)
I’ve managed to pull two arguments out of this insistent ether: where are you at? is bad because it ends with a preposition, and where are you at? is bad because the at is unnecessary. Well, the first is a strawman, as repeatedly discussed on Language Log. The notion that sentences ending with a preposition are substandard was a phantasm dreamt up by John Dryden in 1672 to show that he was a better poet than noted Elizabethan bad-ass Ben Jonson. It’s never been true of English that sentence-final prepositions are wrong. So that’s no reason to disallow where are you at?
The other argument is that at is unnecessary, and following the doctrine of Omit Needless Words, anything that is unnecessary should be removed. As I’ve mentioned before: Omit Needless Words is a stylistic preference! There is nothing in the grammar of English that says unnecessary words must, or even should, be omitted. To illustrate this, let’s take a look at a sentence I just used:
(1a) The other argument is that at is unnecessary […]
(1b) The other argument is at is unnecessary […]
that in (1a) is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. So why put it in there? BECAUSE OMITTING THAT MAKES THE SENTENCE HARD TO UNDERSTAND!
Does omitting at from where are you at? make the question harder to understand? You might balk at this, but, yes. Yes it can. Consider this anecdotal evidence, from one of the sites complaining about at-inclusion:
Example when I ask a person over the phone (who I know is driving) “Where are you?” They respond “In my car” The answer I am trying to get is maybe a nearby freeway exit. This person then says “Oh you want to know where I’m at?” Then proceeds to tell me what I wanted to know. SO FRUSTRATING!
Hello!? This is the point where one ought to stop and think, “Hmm. Perhaps I’m wrong and the at is actually an important signal in our discourse! Perhaps I therefore ought to stop complaining about it.” But I suppose it’s more fun to hard-headedly careen onward, assuming that strict necessity is the only possible reason to permit a preposition to foul up your exquisitely crafted questions, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a linguistic dunce. And you’re welcome to think that, but don’t come complaining to me that people misunderstand your ruthlessly efficient conversational style.
Maybe someone out there has a reason to prefer where are you? to where are you at? But “clearly we’re better off without the ‘at'”? Not in the least.
Summary: “Where are you at?” is a perfectly fine question. The at isn’t an unnecessary redundancy; it’s sometimes a helpful marker. There’s no reason to outlaw it or even avoid it.
46 comments
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August 7, 2008 at 8:01 am
Erin
The same reasoning would apply to “are you coming with?”, a structure Ted likes to complain about. My interpretation of the “coming with” is there’s an elided object that goes with the “with” (“us”/”me”) that you don’t get without it.
August 7, 2008 at 10:20 am
mike
In the spiritus of invoking (e.g.) Latin to add weight to the authority of one’s opinion, one might (the impersonal is also helpful for establishing an academic tone) suggest that “at” used as a sentential post-fix is a locative particle, which helps distinguish the use of “where” from alternative directional uses such as “Where is he going TO?” or “Where is she coming FROM?”, and which provides parallelism to those constructions. Similarly, in the absence of the historically manifested “whence?” and “whither?”, directional question words both, and which have both collapsed into the locative “where?”, it becomes necessary to add preposition-like semantic cues into utterances in order to re-establish the appropriate semantics.
How dat?
August 7, 2008 at 10:21 am
mike
PS That was about 75% BS, just in case I wasn’t clear. :-)
August 7, 2008 at 11:08 am
goofy
I have heard that “are you coming with?” is a calque of German “kommst du mit?” It sounds plausible.
August 7, 2008 at 12:19 pm
mike
Or Yiddish — ?
August 7, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Jonathon
“The sentence cannot be retooled to make sense while including ‘at.'”
What the heck? Then how does the author explain “Where are you from?” which has the exact same syntax? Of course, given that she finds “He is impossible with whom to get along” to be an acceptable rewording of “He is impossible to get along with,” I’d have to say that her notions of correct syntax leave something to be desired.
Hi, my name is Jonathon, and I’m an inveterate “Where are you at” user.
August 11, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Gabe
Hmm, yeah, what are we supposed to do with these? Especially for the ones with “from”, there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable way of restating them. (Not there there was any need to in the first place.) And, given that you have to say “I’m coming with you” rather than “I’m coming you”, it seems like it would be in some sense better to say “Are you coming with?” than “Are you coming?”.
August 12, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Alex
My hypothesis is that the additional ‘at’ in part plays a role as a prosodic gap filler, the gap being left by the articulatory contraction of “where” and “are”.
to me, it sounds a bit strange to say “where’re you” */wer ju/. But when i want to ask something like “where are you going” it almost always comes out as “where’re you going” /wer juu goIn/ In fast casual speech I’ve found myself adding the ‘at’ in ‘where are you at’ when I realized that I began the sentence with a contracted where’re which would have lead to confusion (‘where’re you’ sounds a lot like ‘were you’). Adding that ‘at’ clarifies it pretty well in my dialect group.
August 14, 2008 at 5:38 am
The Ridger
Well, “where at” is an attempt to deal with the loss of “whither” and “whence”, now (almost) invariably “where to” and “where from”. It maintains a nice symmetry.
August 14, 2008 at 5:40 am
The Ridger
In fact – I meant to say – “Where are you running?” is ambiguous. Is the answer “around town” or “in the park” or “on the track” – all “at” answers, or “back home” or “to the hospital” or “across the river” – all “to” answers.
August 26, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Gabe
Alex: I love the idea of prosody playing a role, but that might just be held over enthusiasm from Arto Anttila’s talk.
February 9, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Daniel AC
May i please clarify the error in “at”? First off before i begin let me say that “where are you at?” to me sonds better than where are you?.
Having said this, however, i don’t understand you latin loving people why did you bother to look all these fancy words but didn’t so much as look up the word “preposition”. From the first result on google.com i found:
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/preposit.html
it states the following:
A preposition links nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence. The word or phrase that the preposition introduces is called the object of the preposition.
A preposition usually indicates the temporal, spatial or logical relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence.
So without further ado, it is clear that the existance of “at” ( no matter how good it may sound to me) simply cuts off the sentence in midway, leaving it incomplete and fragmented. I is a linking word, and in the sentence where are you at? at does not complete it, but instead leaves us to question “at what place?”
That is the logic behind the whole no “at” business.
February 10, 2009 at 12:42 am
Gabe
Daniel AC: Your argument is just a re-statement of the “prepositions are not allowed to end a sentence” claim. I refer you to the Language Log post (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004454.html) mentioned above for a thorough history and debunking of that claim.
September 25, 2009 at 12:06 am
MikeyC
Many may be happy to know that the Facebook group “I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar” is falling apart. Members of that group are split on the future, some have gone off to create “I Don’t Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar” and “Lingua”, many have accused the creator of that group of making money from their contributions. All in all, all hell is breaking loose over there.
As for myself, a commited descriptivist, I suggested we rename the group “”I Judge You When You Judge Poor Grammar”, influenced of course by this very site, Motivated Grammar. At the moment, there are no takers.
Things as they are over there at the moment:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/topic.php?uid=2209553478&topic=15495&start=30&hash=a0903c5d18612a67e91be7d90d80eed7
December 8, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Rebecca
Oh this is rich. Someone claiming to be a linguist writes the following:
Alas, even us linguists sometimes find it difficult to not to end up biased against opinions of writers whose writing is peppered with grammatical improprieties.
The proper term is we linguists not us linguists.
December 9, 2009 at 11:59 am
Vance
I believe it’s either “us linguists” or “we peevologists”.
February 7, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Mr. Reason
If you ask “Where are you?” to a friend, they may say “I’m in the City.” If you ask “Where you at??” they will likely respond like, “I’m at the Gap inside the Central Mall in the City.” Therefore, I posit that when you think of asking some one “Where you at?” You are actually asking 2 questions through this colloquial phrase. You want to know “Where are you?” and “What are you at?”.
February 8, 2010 at 5:02 am
Tom S. Fox
You have built a strawman yourself: The third argument does not say that “Where are you at?” is wrong because it ends in a preposition, it says that it is wrong regardless of the fact that sentences ending in a preposition are usually okay.
February 8, 2010 at 5:05 am
Tom S. Fox
I mean, seriously, how could you misunderstand that?
February 8, 2010 at 9:43 am
Gabe
Tom: I didn’t misunderstand that, I don’t think. It is a strawman, of course, but that’s not my fault; it’s the fault of the person who made the argument. You’re certainly welcome to make a more informed argument here.
April 5, 2010 at 4:08 pm
Tom S. Fox
No, you obviously did misunderstand that. You also misunderstood what I wrote. You claimed that the person said it’s not okay to end a sentence with a preposition. But they what they said is, and I quote: ”A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with …“ That’s obviously the exact opposite of what you claimed the person said.
April 6, 2010 at 12:33 am
Gabe
Tom: I don’t understand your objection then. I never said that the third example said anything about sentence-final prepositions being incorrect. In fact, I summarized it with “A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with but the “at” in “Where are you at?” (or “At where are you?”) is just incorrect.” Isn’t that what you’re saying they said?
In the next paragraph, I wrote that one argument is that “where are you at? is bad because it ends with a preposition.” But that wasn’t referring to the third example specifically; it was referring to either the first example or to another commenter’s post within the third example’s thread (Alice).
April 6, 2010 at 7:51 am
Tom S. Fox
The first example doesn’t state that ending a sentence in a preposition is wrong, either. However, if you had included the example of the third thread, it wouldn’t have looked like you were debunking an argument noone was making.
July 26, 2010 at 11:26 am
“Ms.”-ing the point « Motivated Grammar
[…] point 1, this is matter of being beholden to word labels. It reminds me of an objection I once received to preposition stranding; “preposition” suggests “in a position […]
October 27, 2010 at 8:41 am
Tomaz
I have livid in Louisiana for 1 year and many of my friends use the structure “where are you at?” they don’t see anything wrong with that and I picked up the same structure and I use it. However lately my Manager came to me and call my attention to improper English, he asked me to avoid use preposition in the end of the sentence… I was confused because I am originally Brazilian and I learned sentences as “where are you from?”,”where are you going to?”, “what is it for? “, etc. And now I have to find substitute sentences to all of those that has a preposition. So it seems that is a false myth about the propositions. I am glad I found some smart people here that brought understanding to the issue. Thanks.
June 21, 2011 at 1:18 pm
Jerry
Is incorrect spelling okay? I had a professor who indicated that her students would get a grade of F on any paper that included the word “judgement.” Her position was that the correct spelling is “judgment.”
June 21, 2011 at 1:27 pm
Jerry
The argument that “where are you at” to clarify that “in my car” isn’t sufficient, though. In what way does “at” clarify that question? “In my car” is a logically sufficient answer to “where are you located?” The question is ambiguous either way.
July 20, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Chris Morrow
Actually, there is a notable difference. We don’t normally say “I’m at my car” unless we’re standing outside it; we do say things like “I’m at the intersection of First and Main.” So the question “Where are you?” could reasonably be amswered either way, but I’m quite sure that “Where are you at?” would not be answered by most people with “In my car.”
September 28, 2012 at 10:57 am
Joe
And yet you’re one who double spaces after a period?
January 21, 2013 at 4:30 pm
Alex
It should be “alright”, not “all right”.
January 24, 2013 at 10:05 pm
dw
@Alex: There’s a hundred prescriptivist books out there that would disagree with you.
March 7, 2013 at 10:18 pm
David L. Gold
Yiddish is not the source or one of the sources of the English construction exemplified by the sentence “are you coming with?” because Yiddish has no analogous construction.
March 8, 2013 at 8:26 am
David L. Gold
Addition to my comments of 7 March 2013: Yiddish does have a verb mitkumen, cognate with New High German mitkommen, but none of its uses could have served as a model for “are you coming with?” or sentences of similar construction. The prepositional complement mit- is fused to the second element of the verb in the infinitive (mitkumen), the present participle (mitkumendik), and the past participle (mitgekumen). Only in the present-tense and the imperative forms of the verb would the complement be separated from the stem of the verb, but those forms do not occur (as in *undz kumen mir mit ‘we are coming with’ and *kumts mit! ‘come with!’). Rather, in the present-tense and the imperative forms, a finite form of the simple verb kumen is used and it is accompanied by a prepositional phrase the head of which is the preposition mit, which is obligatorily followed by a pronoun (as in varieties of English not having the construction exemplified by “are you coming with?”): “ets kumts mit undz?” ‘are you coming with us?’, “mit em kumste tsi mit ir?” ‘are you coming with him or with her?’, “kumt zhe mit undz!” ‘do come with us!’, and so on. Another reason why Yiddish is irrelevant will follow presently (were paragraphing possible in these posts, I would state it here).
March 8, 2013 at 10:55 am
David L. Gold
Since few non-Jews have known Yiddish, Yiddish usages entering English always follows this path: Yiddish > Ashkenazic English [= the Yiddish-influenced English of Yiddish-speakers and their descendants] > this or that variety of non-Ashkenazic English. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that Yiddish had the construction exemplified by English “are you coming with?” In that case, we would expect Ashkenazic English to have it too (= criterion 7 in “Nine Criteria for Assessing the Likelihood of Yiddish Influence on English (With Examples),” in David L. Gold, Studies in Etymology and Etiology (With Emphasis on Germanic, Jewish, Romance, and Slavic Languages), 2009, pp. 237-255. Yet Ashkenazic English does not have that construction (as is not unexpected, given the fact that it is absent in Yiddish). Three possible geneses for the English construction will be suggested presently.
March 8, 2013 at 12:16 pm
David L. Gold
The construction exemplified by “Are you coming with?” is found in at least five languages: Afrikaans, Dutch, English, French, and German. In all of them, it is informal or slang. In four of them, it is found at least with the word meaning ‘with’ (in Afrikaans, the word is saam ‘along’). In at least one of them, French, it is also found with the word meaning ‘without’ (sans). Since at this late date we may be unable to determine how it arose in each of the five, only possibilities may be suggestable. (1) In any of the languages, it could be a spontaneous innovation, namely, a shortening of a full prepositional phrase. The fact that the construction is informal or slang in all five supports that supposition because shortenings are frequent in their informal and slang registers. My guess is that such is the case of the German construction, for it seems to predate significant English influence on German and, though Dutch and French have influenced German, it is not the type of usage — I say this intuitively, without being able to put my hunch into coherent words — that speakers of that language have borrowed from either Dutch or French. Likewise, again intuitively, I suppose that at least in the French of France it is solely a spontaneous innovation. (2) The fact that Afrikaans, Dutch, English, French, and German speech territories are contiguous suggests a second possibility, not incompatible with the one just mentioned (that is, the construction may in this or that language, though probably not French or German, be of more than one origin). As goofy reported on 7 August 2008, German influence on American English has already been suggested (may we get a bibliographical reference?). The author of the article “Frans met haar op” in Wikipedia: De vrije encyclopedie is certain that the construction in Belgian French and in Walloon is solely of Dutch and Flemish origin (“Door invloed van het Nederlands en Vlaams op het Belgisch-Frans en het Waals komen daarin ook taalconstructies voor die op het Nederlands lijken. Zo is het niet ongewoon om het volgende te horen uit de mond van Belgische Franstaligen: ‘Tu viens avec au fritkot?’ in plaats van ‘Tu m’accompagnes à la friterie?’ (van ‘Ga je mee naar de frituur?”) but would presumably have been less sure had (s)he known that the construction is also found in the French of France (whence it could have reached Belgian French and/or Walloon, whether or not it is also of Dutch and/or Flemish origin). John R. Ross discusses at least the English construction in “On Declarative Sentences” (Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in English Transformational Grammar, 1970). The authors of an extremely poorly made dictionary of South African English write “prob. mistrans. Afk. saam, adv. along” (an example of the Afrikaans construction is “Gaan jy saam?” ‘are you coming with me?’, ‘are you coming with us?’, and so on) and thus disregard the possibility of a spontaneous South African English innovation and, if the construction occurs in British English (does it?), of a British English origin.
March 15, 2013 at 8:14 pm
Dan M.
FYI, this blog, like almost all current blogging software, renders text into separate paragraphs when you two line breaks in the text entry field, by pressing “Enter” twice…
…thus. Which should look rather like separate paragraphs even while still in the text entry field.
July 26, 2013 at 7:15 am
Cynthia
Thank you!
February 21, 2014 at 10:11 am
John M.
Someone above compared “Where are you at?” with “Where are you from?” They are not analogous. In the latter, the word “from” adds essential information to the question – it’s not asking where you are, but where you came from, whereas in the former, the “at” is superfluous. There is no point in saying that extra word/syllable. It’s extra work to say it.
If you want to say it, you can, but it’s unnecessary and can cause others to judge you poorly, so I don’t see the point.
June 24, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Murray
The word “where” MEANS, “at what location”… the “at” is implied in the “where”. So saying, “where are you at” is exactly the same as saying, “at what location are you at”… would those people say it that way? Doubtful, because they’d think that sounds dumb and would make you sound uneducated, illiterate, ignorant…. BINGO! So does “Where are you at?” It bugs me enough when people talk like this in regular conversation, but whatever; I’ve had to get over it. What really ticks me off is the extent to which it’s now being used in academic and professional discourse.
July 7, 2014 at 1:40 pm
Betty
You shouldn’t talk on the phone when you’re driving, no matter where you are.
July 12, 2014 at 5:18 am
David L. Gold
Descriptively speaking:
“Where […] at” is a construction that arose in British English (Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary gives examples of British use),
American use of the construction is of British English origin (A Supplement to The Oxford English Dictionary and the second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary give examples of American use).
So far as I can tell, “at” is redundant here (can anyone think of instances of “where […] at” that express something which just “where […]” does not?).
Prescriptively speaking:
If you want to avoid redundant constructions, do not use “where […] at.”
July 8, 2016 at 2:45 pm
John
The Brits, Canadians and Australians don’t add a stupid “at” in there, the experts say it is wrong and if you can’t follow the experts, there is no hope for you, go ahead and sound stupid if you want. All your belly aching about how you don’t understand why it’s wrong just makes you all the more stupid.
November 13, 2016 at 4:36 pm
Ann
Good on you for attempting to maintain some standards in our language usage. After a very cursory review of a small bit of your post, however, I can’t resist pointing out a few things to which a traditional grammarist might take exception. (Sorry if I’m repeating someone else’s comment, but I haven’t taken the time to read all of the posts):
1. “I, ‘like’ (should be ‘as’) everyone else, judge people when they use non-standard grammar”
2. “I like to think that my judgements consist solely of determining the group with which the person identifies ‘themself’ (should be ‘herself or himself’ or ‘him- or herself’)”
3. “Alas, even ‘us’ (should be ‘we’) linguists sometimes find it difficult to not to end up biased”
I could go through the rest of your article with a fine-toothed comb, but these were just things that jumped out at me when I came across your article, having googled ‘where are you at’ – a turn of phrase that I’ve disconcertingly heard from a number of people whose facility with the English language I respect – Kathryn Ryan comes to mind.
Purists, by definition, are jerks, in my view, but if one sets oneself up as a purist, he or she needs to be careful to remain beyond reproach.
May 28, 2020 at 10:07 am
bumbafrankie
This post is asinine and its author has no business commenting on proper grammar. The abomination “where at” is redundant, incorrect and makes you sound illiterate. Don’t say it.
November 15, 2021 at 9:11 am
Peter
If it is not bad to add ‘at’ unnecessarily to the end of a sentence, can I add it twice and still be correct?
Hey, where are you at at?
July 4, 2022 at 4:32 am
Do you say at or on? - Functions Dairy
[…] Is where are you at grammatically correct? […]