LOL. Accident and Emergency.
Not me. I underststand “at church” to mean attending a sermon or Mass, or slightly more broadly to include such activities as Sunday school. I understand “at the church” to mean the people are there either for solely administrative purposes like a regular meeting of elders or deacons, or to for other non-religious purposes like repairs, painting, or gardening.
I don’t know how I missed that - of course, I meant "at/in the church means they are physically there for non-religious purposes.
Never mind, forgot tags.
I should have thought of that before I wrote my lengthy response.
Fun fact in case you never watched Sons of Anarchy: From what I’ve read, motorcycle clubs frequently call their chapter officer meetings “church”. I have no idea why.
Americans who are into gaming do know about Fortnite, though I’m not one of them, so I don’t know if the name has anything to do with the name for a period of two weeks.
Those of us who read a good deal mostly do know the word from English literature, and I think also some earlier American lit, but it isn’t a word that comes up in daily conversation. If you were renting a beach house for a two-week vacation, the agent would be nonplussed if you told them you wanted the house for a fortnight.
Sometimes, when I’m “at work” I’m ‘in the field’. Often I’m measuring things or taking pictures.
ISTM, that the article is used if you’re taking about a physical location, but if you’re really talking about an activity that occurs at a location, you skip the article.
At school or at work, you are more doing what is done at school than where you are. If you are at a place, then the place is more relevant than the activity.
Or maybe more specific. If I am at the hospital, it may be that I am visiting, getting an MRI, going into surgery, or giving someone a ride.
For the Brits, would a nurse say they were at hospital if they were there for their shift? For anyone, does the school janitor say he’s going to school?
I’m the opposite. If someone is at church, they are involved in a religious activity. But if they are at the church, it’s more likely they are there doing some ambiguous activity that isn’t worship.
The ‘in hospital’ / ‘in the hospital’ thing is more like a ‘life status’ thing (sorry if I’m repeating anyone). If I was being specific about someone’s location, like if someone asked where someone was ata specific time that day, I might say they’re ‘at the hospital’ or ‘in the hospital’ if the context was right, eg if I lived somewhere where the place that sick people go is THE (singular) hospital and definitely if I was talking about a staff member or visitor, maybe an outpatient going for a test etc. But if someone, say, asked me how so-and-so was (doing), then I’d say ‘I’m afraid they’re in hospital’. If I lived in, say, London, where there might be several hospitals all nearby then I would probably never say ‘the hospital’ unless again the context meant it was clear, eg my partner was staff at a known hospital and someone asked where they were (and I didn’t just say ‘at work’). This is complicated!! Haha
Nurses - I’d guess they’d say they were at work, unless they wanted to specify that they worked in a hospital. “In hospital” implies that the person is a patient, not a member of staff.
Likewise, a school janitor(caretaker) wouldn’t be “going to school” unless they were a pupil. They’d be going “to work” unless they needed to specify where they worked.
Spreading the geographical range a bit, as a university administrator I once got a message from a student from India that he’d called to see me “but you were not on seat” - a usage I’d never heard before.
So “in hospital” is effectively synonymous with “hospitalized.” Which means if you’re describing someone whose presence at the hospital is not due to hospitalization, you’d refer to the hospital in a different way. Yes?
Yes. E.g. if you knew a midwife who sometimes worked in the maternity ward and sometimes doing house calls, you would say “Jane’s at the hospital today”.
It is! But only when we try to explain it, weirdly. When actually speaking we just say what we say quite naturally, and it’s never, or only rarely, misunderstood.
In French class at school they taught us that the French consider a fortnight to be 15 days. They literally translate is as fourteen nights. Not sure if that’s actually true or just our French teacher pulling our legs.
I wonder if this is just a matter of my memory being odd, but I could swear we said “to prom” interchangeably with “to the prom” back in the early-to-mid-90s. As in, “who are you taking to prom”? At least it does not sound the least bit odd to my ears, and I haven’t talked with anyone or heard about prom probably in about twenty years.
Like here’s a post from 2000 on this board, and it uses “to prom”:
ETA: Oh, I see you said “in the last 25 years that the article disappeared.” Well, my sense of time is warped, I see, so my experience would actually track with your sentence.
ETA: OK, better cite. This is from 1926:
“Many of our girls are going to prom …”
“For the thirteenth man that I asked to Prom […] Oh, the thirteenth man that I asked to Prom […]”
I mean, we do the same thing in US English, just not all the words UK English uses it for. For example, we say “in school/college/church” instead of “in the school/college/church” (at least when referring someone being there for their studies or worship as opposed to merely being at that physical location.)
It’s less that the French consider a fortnight 15 days and more that there are two methods of counting, inclusive and exclusive. “Fortnight” comes from In one method (“inclusive”, I think ) and the French ( and other languages) expression from other. In one method , you count the first day, so if the first day is Sunday, Monday is day 2 and so on. Saturday is day 7. In the other method , you count the intervals , so a 7 day vacation has you leaving on Sunday and returning the next Sunday ( Sunday to Monday is one day and so on)
OK, looks like n-gram viewer does seem to indicate various periods of time when one was favored over the other, and does confirm that observation that “to prom” has become more popular recently:
Looks like up until the mid-50, “to prom” shows up slightly more than or equal to “to the prom” in written works. Then “to prom” takes a sharp uptick from 1955-1965 before falling to dead even with “to the prom.” (I’m curious what happened here and whether there is another explanation other than relative popularity. The search doesn’t take into account context for what is being talked about, just those literal sequence of characters in the database.) Then around the mid-70s, “to the prom” starts to pull away from “to prom” until it’s overtaken around 2015 onward.
So this isn’t also isn’t inconsistent with my memory that they were both being used.
In the UK it used to be ‘The Ball’, especially ‘The May Ball’, but the Americanism (‘Prom’) has taken over. Not for the first time!
Which is traditionally held in June, of course.
Is that related to this exchange from Doctor Who?
Romana: Oh, I do love the spring!
Doctor: It’s October.
Romana: I thought you said we were coming here for May Week.
Doctor: I did. May Week is in June.
Romana: I’m confused.