Writing Wednesday: Prepositions

A preposition links nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence. The word or phrase that the preposition introduces is called the object of the preposition.

The other day my wife asked me if we could would get some take-out for dinner, I asked why and she replied, “Look … the fridge.”

I realize I missed the preposition in that sentence so rather than asking her to repeat herself, I filled in my own. I decided that the word I missed was, “At”.

So I looked at the fridge. I had to admit it was pretty ugly.
The side of it wasn’t much prettier.

So I did what any guy would do and came up with a solution to fix the problem. I grabbed a pint of red paint, a paintbrush and some soda cartons to use as drop cloths and painted the fridge.

An hour later I had a fridge that anyone would be proud to store food in, or at least wouldn’t be appalled to look at.

As I was admiring my handiwork she came in the kitchen and when I told her how I fixed the problem of the fridge being too ugly to work with she informed me that she had said, “Look in the fridge” not, “Look at the fridge”.

I looked inside my masterpiece and found out it was empty and then remembered I was supposed to pick some groceries on the way home from work the night before.

The moral of the story is pay attention to your prepositions as the wrong one can totally change the meaning of a sentence and lead to unexpected results.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts