| 词组 | at |
| 释义 | at Handbook writers from Vizetelly 1906 to Harper 1985 have been concerned over the use of the preposition at somewhere in the vicinity of and especially after the adverb where. This combination is evidently chiefly an Americanism (attested by the OED Supplement and entered in the Dictionary of American Regional English), but not entirely unknown in British dialects. It is first attested as an American idiom in Bartlett's 1859 Dictionary of Americanisms. Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi (1883) associated it with Southern speech; the DARE calls it chiefly Southern and Midland. It is, of course, entirely futile to attempt to eradicate a speech form by denouncing it in books on writing. And a more harmless idiom would be hard to imagine. Our evidence shows the idiom to be nearly nonexistent in discursive prose, although it occurs in letters and transcriptions of speech: • 'Fore you begins for to wipe your eyes 'bout Br' Rabbit, you wait and see where 'bouts Br' Rabbit gwine to fetch up at —Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, 1880, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983 • In half the stories I felt he didn't know himself where he was coming out at —Flannery O'Connor, letter, 2 Aug. 1958 In current speech, the at serves to provide a word at the end of the sentence that can be given stress. It tends to follow a noun or pronoun to which the verb has been elided, as in this utterance by an editor here at the dictionary factory: • Have any idea where Kathy's at? You will note that at cannot simply be omitted; the 's must be expanded to is to produce an idiomatic sentence if the at is to be avoided. For a particular mid-20th-century use of this idiom, see where...at. |
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