Saturday, May 12, 2007

Fromnexttowhich

Proper preposition use occasionally puts me in interesting situations grammatically. (I would like to interject that I know how funny, how odd and eccentric the previous sentence sounds.)

For example: today, while I was leaving Target in search of my car, I was chatting with myself about where it could be. "Ah yes, I got a good spot." (That never happens at Target. Something about angles there just discourages me from even seeing or trying to see close parking spots.) I found my car and plotted my course, utilizing crosswalks, heading through unoccupied handicapped places, and carefully avoiding the white car backing out of a spot ahead.

In fact, my car was parked in the spot from next to which the white car had just left. I did a double take. Did I just describe something as "from next to which"? Was that correct? The wording sounded too strange. So my brain went over its options. "Next to from which." No. "Next to which from"? Uh-uh. "From which next to"? Desperation had set in, and I knew with this last attempt that my brain had properly formulated the phraseology at the beginning. "From next to which" is a legitimate English phrase, rarely useful, but extraordinarily fun to say. Try it. Fromnexttowhich. FromNextToWhich. From next to which. Are you laughing?

As a side note, I was also describing to myself (I am pretty sure these are silent observations, not out loud, if that assures you at all.) tonight the origination point of a noise. Is it right to say, "I'm almost sure the sound came hence" if you arrive at the suspected location? Or do you need to say, "from hence"? Words like hence and whence were designed to deprive you of the infinite joy of articulating similar phrases to fromnexttowhich. I forgive them, for the sake of being such lovely typically useless words themselves.

To God be all glory.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes I'm laughing. lol ;)
Of course you COULD just say it came: "fromrightthere"

Lisa of Longbourn said...

No, that would be horribly undescriptive, and wouldn't say what I meant at all.
To God be all glory,
Lisa of Longbourn