I and a colleague disagree over the construct: “I left the house at about 6pm”
I’m happy with it but she claims “at” and “about” contradict each other, “at” being precise and “about” being imprecise.
Fundamentaly, we disagree over the role played by the word “at”.
So, who’s right, who’s wrong?
She is, for the reason stated.
And, BTW, “My colleague and I” is preferred to “I and my colleague.”
Do you have a cite for that?
I don’t have my style guides with them, but The New York Times accepts this usage.
With me, of course. :smack:
I think that’s a very good way of approaching lexico-grammatical questions. (Sorry about the ugly phrasing, but it does stand to remind us that vocabulary and grammar are interdependent to a large extent.)
While your average dictionary explanation of ‘at’ may run something along the lines of ‘happening at a particular time’, you only have to consider the range of expressions that can be used with it to appreciate that ‘particular’ has a broad sweep. Thus, both ‘The meeting will take place at 3pm’ and ‘He only sees her at Christmas’ are entirely possible in anyone’s book. Moreover, though I believe it’s useful to see prepositions as having core semantic meanings, it should be borne in mind that such meanings are pretty broad and tend to resist definitions as such.
Further, sometimes the information we want to convey is necessarily vague. In such circumstances, wording such as yours conveys not only your meaning but also your intention - in this case, to show that you cannot be sure of the time and care enough in the particular situation to wish to insert the word ‘about’. (After all, there are times (like over your first pint down the pub) when you’d just say ‘I left the house at 6’. BUT, if you’d just had an argument with the wife, or if you were giving a statement to the police, you might well want to add the hedging word as a kind of disclaimer!)
Of course, it’s also possible to say/write ‘I left the house about 6pm’, but not, I would suggest, necessary at all syntactically, semantically or pragmatically (used in the linguistic sense).
Cleanup in aisle three!
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The two words are different parts of speech.
At (prep) - on, near, or by the time or age of
About (adv) - approximately, nearly, in the area or vicinity, near
If anything, there is some redundancy, but not a contradiction. It’s not my preferred choice of wording but I don’t see it breaking any major rules. I’d use “around” in place of “at about”.
As a copy editor, I would get rid of “at” in most instances. I wouldn’t think someone was a grammatically incorrect moron, though, if they said it.
For a minute there I thought you were going to do the old “I left the house at about 6:12 p.m.” thing, in which case I would have deleted “about” rather than “at.”
And "A colleague and I . . . " is preferred, as Twickster said.
I bet if you surveyed 100 native English speakers, 99 of them would see nothing wrong with “at about,” as used in OP. That’s just the way English is, idiomatically. Semantically the construction might be contradictory/redundant, but, as Roger says, pragmatically it serves a purpose.
Perfectly ordinary phrase; shows up all the time in the speech of native English speakers. “At about six pm” is kosher.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage has a nice entry on at about. Here are some choice excerpts:
Among these sources are works by Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Ezra Pound, George Santayana, and Evelyn Waugh.
There’s no basis for the claim that the expression is semantically contradictory, and redundant or not, it clearly has a respectable history.
I’m with you, marky33, and I’d wager your colleague picked up this little grammar tip early in life from the same kind of language pedant who objects to split infinitives. IMHO, investing tiny little “at” with this level of precision is just a little too persnickety. (On preview I’m glad to see Merriam Webster agrees with me.)
As a professional editor and writer, I wouldn’t give “at about” a second thought. If I were going to change anything, I’d cut “about” before I cut “at.” To me, “I left the house about 6pm” sounds…I don’t know…kinda dumb.
But I agree with everyone who says “I and a colleague” has got to go.
Thanks for the cite, sundog.
Yes, that’s the point. You can’t really talk about semantics with prepositions; at least, not as the OP’s colleague wants to. I think the reason this construction exists is because certain verbs “attach” themselves to certain prepositions. E.g., “Leave at.” But when someone wants to emphasize a general time, that’s not exact, they feel the need to include an additional qualifier: “about.” Hence, “at about.”
The very fact that a preposition is typically placed (or positioned) before a noun group or a pronoun means that it’s likely to follow a verb. In that sense almost any preposition will “attach” itself to almost any verb.
I generally agree, commasense (as a proofreader). But in conversation, and on a message board, I’d let these things slide. “I and a colleague” sounds bad only because some teacher arbitrarily told us not to do it. I woundn’t say it myself, but I don’t see how it could ever undermine the language. The justification is that one puts oneself after others. But grammatically, this is of no importance. “A colleauge and I,” vs. “I and a colleauge.” It’s ettiquette, not grammar.
Yes, of course. I just meant to say that some verbs can get away with or without a preposition.
But you’ve raised a very interesting question: to what does a preposition belong?