Grammarmama: Get Your Preposition On!

It's been a while since I began Grammarmama, intended to be a mini-series to help you help yourself speak gooder by teaching your tyke how to talk proper. I know I've been sluggish in following my lay/lie post, but prepositions have brought me back.

I'm a tad sensitive to prepositions, a touch tweaked by them when they aren't used correctly. They are small but they can hurt; a little splinter in the sentence if you will.

And no, I'm not talking about stuffy grammar rules requiring people to murder their own tongues in order to avoid ending sentences with a preposition, e.g., "Crabkid, this behavior is the sort up which I shall not put," to borrow from Winnie Churchill. I'm not some fuddy-duddy pedant. I can be sententious. When I'm not using words like "sententious." Meaning this grammarmama has no beef with easy talking and writing. But some things, prepositionally speaking, do grate, like the following exchange, at bath time:

Mom: "Why did you just pour [a giant pitcher of] water onto the bathroom floor?"
Crabkid: "I did it on accident."
Mom: "By accident."
Crabkid: "By accident. I just poured it on accident."

Now "different from" and "different to" is something one can actively convo about, but "on accident" just plum don't exist, people. And so when Crabkid does these sorts of things she gets away with other things, like pouring water directly onto the bathroom floor, because I just can't get past the prepositional offense.

On the same token, there's something else that really gets me all kinds of unreasonably peppery when I hear it. Almost got you there, didn't I? On the same token! Sneaky Crabmommy! It's by the same token. NPR, are you listening? I hear you on your token all the time, but you're actually off it by two letters. Speaking of NPR, Terry Gross, can you please stop saying "you-man" when you mean "human"? It gets me all twitchy-like beneath my seatbelt.

If there's one thing I will teach my daughter it's what really counts and by God, if she ever falls in love with a youman who says "on the same token" I will just have to dispense with creature, whoever s/he is and I will do so by telling him/her all kinds of embarrassing claptrap real and invented about my child and our family. And if that doesn't work I will behave as crabaciously and ridiculously as possible, which is astonishingly easy for me, thereby sending the young grammatically challenged suitor far from the fold.

When Crabkid asks me why I did it, why I shunned her true love through my appalling behavior, I will feign total surprise! "I'm so sorry I ruined your relationship, darling! I did it on accident."

*Related segue: As a South African who came to the USA in my early twenties I have had to grapple with and learn to understand what appear to be American prepositional faux pas if you are coming from the outside in. For example, Americans love to double up on preps: "off of the train"; "outside of the house." And they like to add a prep where none is needed: "Listen up!" And yet, Americans can be mysteriously economical in their use of articles: "Get in back of the car" sounds quite odd to those of us used to "in the back of."

All that said, squashing snobbery in language is a good thing and I am a strong believer of the "When in Rome" approach to English, if and only if it doesn't contradict a fundamental grammar rule of American English. Not sure how many people really know this, but there are, in fact, numerous differences between American and Commonwealth English that extend far beyond the dropping of the "u" in "colour"; for example, American punctuation is significantly different from British punctuation and as a writer and editor and teacher I have had to learn those diffs dang well. So, you won't catch me living in the US but consulting the Oxford dictionary to orientate myself properly in this heathen land. I am happy to orient myself with Webster's, just so long as nobody asks me to get my token on.

Got any grammar beefs for me?