The Grammarnator has not appeared in these pages for a while both because he got to thinking that his tenure had run its course and because it has been difficult lately find egregious errors in the Insider. The Grammarnatrix, debuting in the Be Local issue, testifies to the latter feeling by finding a mistake that she acknowledges really isn’t one — anymore, nowadays, at least. But the Grammarnator wonders if the editor might be tossing out a challenge and discovers that he has something to say after all.
As you recall, she was discussing ending a sentence ending with a preposition, basing her article on a remark by the Film Snob on the movie Wanderlust: “I really identified with the characters, in that I found myself wandering out of the theater about 45 minutes in.” Nothing wrong with the preposition at the end, the Grammarnatrix asserts, and I agree. The time has long passed to get upset about that usage. But is in a preposition in that sentence?
How about calling it an adverb? One of the things adverbs do is indicate where or when something happens. “Go play outside,” Mom orders, and Junior responds, “No, I wanna play in.” Outside and our friend in are adverbs in this exchange, and it seems reasonable to think of in as an adverb in the comment of the Film Snob.
Here’s an analogy. “The warning light came on when the plane was 20 minutes out from Boston.” The last two words are a prepositional phrase, making out an adverb telling where it is from Boston — or, in a sense, when it is from Boston, just as the Film Snob is “45 minutes in” when he leaves the movie. Indeed, if the Film Snob had simply written “45 minutes in, I found myself wandering out of Wanderlust,” the Grammarnatrix might not have had anything to say.
To make the analogy more intriguing, is there a difference between “20 minutes out from Boston” and “20 minutes out of Boston”? Does the former imply that the plane is inbound and the latter that it is outbound? And why can you omit the adverb in one phrase (“20 minutes from Boston”), but not in the other (“20 minutes of Boston”)?
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say.
