>BTW, I just speant 15 minutes wondering why something can be: > > "on" or "at" or "in" a website > "in" a newspaper or magazine, but not "on" or "at" > "on" tv, but not "in" or "at" > "on" my computer, but not "in" or "at" > "on" the phone, but not "in" or "at" > "in" a program, but not "on" or "at" > >why can something be "on" or "at" and even "in" a web page? :) Maybe >it's because all the other media's can be represented in a web page so >they all work. Anyone have a better explaination? No doubt you'll get as many different answers as people replying. Here's a longish one, didn't see how to shorten it by much. A website is basically one of many bulletin boards scattered around the web. That it is a bulletin board justifies saying you found/saw/read something on the website, as in "posted on the bulletin board". That it is one of many in various "places" justifies "at" in place of "on": I found it at Alice's website rather than at Bob's next door or across the country. "In" a website is not as common but reasonable for a website with a long enough passage to think about the item as being somewhere in that passage---"You'll find it somewhere in Bob's long web page on elflore". The particular ink particles we paid for, along with the paper itself, are printed on the newspaper, but although many newspapers are delivered around the neighborhood they all contain the same lead story, which is therefore abstractly "in" rather than physically "on" the paper. And neither the ink nor the story is "at" the newspaper because the newspaper is delivered to us rather than us to the newspaper so we don't think of the newspaper as being "at" any particular place. In contrast we know we are visiting a website even when we don't know its geographic coordinates---it is enough for us to know its URL to know where it is in cyberspace. The use of "on" in "What's on tonight" refers to a program, e.g. there is a dance, a rumble, and a Salvation Army meeting on tonight. "On" the TV is using this programmatic sense of on. The only things "in" the TV are mysterious electronic gizmos, electrocuted spiders, etc. The cat's ball might be "at" the TV but for some reason we usually specify "under", "on", "near", "besides". TV shows obviously are neither in nor under/near/besides the TV, and when we say they're on the TV we mean they're on the TV program, not on the TV set for the same reason they're not under the TV set. What's on your computer (besides the cat or a flower pot) is mostly what's on the hard drive, but note that it will usually be in a folder or directory, and the blocks of that data may be found at particular locations in the drive's address space. Somehow being on the hard drive is the outermost of these and therefore the one that transfers most readily to the computer itself, perhaps because we think of the computer as having only one hard drive but multiple folders and couldn't care less about blocks and address space. But why "on" the hard drive and not "in"? Beats me. I also don't know where the expression "on the phone" came from, at least I can't think of any precedent for it. Conceivably it's from the above programmatic use of "on", each end of the phone conversation being thought of as a program entertaining the other end, but maybe that's a bit of a stretch. Maybe it comes from the days of party lines when people would get impatient with their neighbors who'd been "sitting on" the line too long, like sitting on a chair. No idea. A program works pretty much like a newspaper or book---it's a long piece of text that you find things in rather than on or at. Just my two cents, which I didn't have anywhere else to spend just now. Vaughan -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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