I came across a video somewhere on the internet today, of someone’s front-door security-camera footage. It showed a delivery man petting the homeowner’s cat, and the uploader had captioned it something like, Check out the UPS guy loving on my cat.
Well that’s a new one, I thought. Loving on. Hating on I’d heard of, but not loving on. Continue reading
I’ll have to make up some excuse for why I’m late.
They often argue, but they always make up soon afterwards.
Let me just finish putting on my make-up and then we can go.
I’m often impressed by the economy of the English language.
Well, it depends, doesn’t it?
Even if you’ve never thought about it before, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the word into is a combination of the words in and to. If you think about any sentence in which you might use the word, it clearly combines the meaning of both:
He walked into the room.
To is there because there’s movement, and to usually comes after verbs of movement. In is there because he ends up in the room. Easy. But, does this mean we can always replace in to with into?
Thinking yesterday about the question of whether or not we can use in and out together, and about phrasal verbs, made me think of something else. Have you ever noticed that fill in and fill out mean the same thing?
English-Language Thoughts 