Today I took a test to be a state worker drone. This was one of the questions.
Which one of these sentences is incorrect?
a. We are going by grandma’s house to visit her.
b. We are going to grandma’s house to visit her
c. Either is correct.
I actually wrote out and signed an objection to this question. I argued that neither sentence is correct. In the first case, ‘by’ is not the correct term unless I want to imply that we’re stopping at her place on the way to somewhere else, and there is no such implication in the sentence. The second sentence is wrong because there is no period at the end.
Was I wrong? Is ‘by’ simply a poorer choice of word as opposed to being flat out wrong?
I would say the first is correct. Who knows where Grandma is relative to her house? I might need to go by her house to visit her in the field next door where she’s picking daisies. Plus, it’s technically accurate, as a matter of grammar and punctuation.
But there’s no rationalizing the lack of any ending punctuation in the second sentence.
Well, not ending with a period is pretty damning, but…
I don’t see how this sentence can be ruled incorrect just because there’s no implication in the actual sentence. They certainly could be taking a detour past her house to visit her. I would need stronger evidence than idle speculation to move forward with this case.
There’s no need to stick grandma out in the field. Usages like “I stopped by the bank on the way home” or “The new neighbors came by the house while you were gone” are common in American English.
Sentence (2) clearly lacks proper end punctuation, which means (3) can’t possibly be correct.
That’s nasty - my guess is the second sentence’s lack of period is a typo, but when you’re testing someone else’s language skills, proofread the goddamned thing!
I know people who have written and editted civil service tests. Don’t overthink them. The missing period in the second sentence is almost certainly a typo and b is the correct answer.
This question will probably end up being thrown out.
I was wondering that myself. There were other sentences that didn’t end in periods either, on the same page, but those were a different type of question. I was supposed to pick the most appropriate word to fill in a blank space in the sentence, so I didn’t need to decide whether those sentences were correct or not.
But the sentence isn’t “stop by,” which is of course a usage that is understood to imply that specific location, not possibly something just in the vicinity. “Going by” can mean either, unless the context of the sentence (like your second example) eliminates the ambiguity. The “by” sentence in the multiple choice could mean either. Maybe just my experience, but I think “come by the house” is not exactly the idiomatic mirror image of “go by the house.” The latter, to my ear, is at least a bit ambiguous (meaning either “to” or “near” or “past”), while the former, not so much.
But my point is that there is no inherent logical flaw in the first sentence, which is what I believe Boyo Jim was detecting; there are countless “backstories” we could create that would make the sentence perfectly logical for any of the senses conveyed by the word “by.” It’s a perfectly cromulent sentence.
ETA: Plus, in my warped brain, parsing sentences and constructing hypotheticals to answer questions like the OP’s is loads of fun. So there.
What is the basis of this assertion? I’ve never heard this grammar rule before. Stopping by, going by, coming by are all commonly used terms, in my experience. Putting aside the misplaced period, both sentences seem grammatically correct to me.
I would use “by” such as " Sara came by this afternoon and we had tea." I don’t see why this would be wrong or imply she was on her way to other places after. Or, “where are you going? I’m going by Jim’s place.” sound legit to me.
Even if your interpretation of “by” were correct (which i would dispute), it would not make (a) incorrect, because the person taking the exam is being asked to evaluate whether the sentence is correct. In the absence of any other information (i.e., whether or not grandma’s place is the final destination), there is nothing incorrect about the sentence itself.
Except that the latter part of the sentence, “to visit her,” implies to me that that’s the reason for the journey, lacking more information. So it sounds weird.
Be careful with prepositions. Only a handful have actual rules of use:
on Monday
at/until/before/after 2 o’clock.
in June
Most of the others have regional or dialect variations:
on the weekend (correct for American English)
on weekend (correct for British English, but incorrect when judged by Americans.)
Imho, collocations (words that tend to go together) are a horrible form of “grammar rule” and should not be on a standardized grammar test, particularly those involving preposition + noun. Phrasal verbs (verb + preposition, e.g. turn on) are fairer.
Yeah it was something like that. What I remember is polling the American English teachers at my school and they all agreed they would mark it as an error.
