Run, it’s the prepositional know-it-all! – 7/5/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

I thank the reader who, in the column’s comments area, amended the “strictly speaking” that I had written to “strictly speaking”. He gave me the cue to talk about one of the most insidious forms of sabichonism, prepositionalism.

As some of the readers of the column must already be sick of knowing, I call know-it-all the habit of pointing out in the speech and writing of others “errors in Portuguese” that do not exist, or rather, that they only exist because the know-it-alls are very keen.

I don’t like know-it-all. It costs the collective linguistic intelligence dearly, leaves speakers insecure and convinces them that the most important thing in a language is that it is a collective of practical jokes.

The scolding is with the disease, not with the sick. Know-it-alls are victims, I almost became one myself and I know. The contagion is like that of zombies, each bite of the know-it-all creates a new one.

They are almost always recoverable. Maybe you don’t know what Celso Cunha (1917-1989) wrote: “Strictly speaking, an adjective only exists in reference to a noun”. That: “strictly”, not “in”. Cunha was a normative, a conservative, but like any good grammarian he did not indulge in nonsense.

Prep sasichonism (for short) owes much to the purists of the Portuguese language, merciless hunters of echoes of French, the imperialist idiom of the time. The preposition “a” was one of his favorite targets, and uses artificial phrases such as “in rigor”, “in color”, “in the long term”, etc.

Yes, some of these “a” cases may have French influence (so what), but some may not. In the case of color TV, the accusation of Gallicism cannot be sustained in any court – the French say “en couleurs”.

However, the most famous case of prep know-it-all doesn’t seem to have to do with loanword hunters. The “home delivery” recommendation is a real domestic conundrum.

The ultraconservative Napoleão Mendes de Almeida (1911-1998), a popular grammarian of his time, wrote about “home delivery”: “Spurious expression, although generalized; amend to ‘home delivery’, as delivery is ‘in’ a place”.

The argument is none of those things. It pretends that prepositions do not have a certain degree of volatility and makes a narrow reading of the spatial criterion —as the delivery person does not enter the house, he stays at the door, the opposite reasoning would be equally valid.

The biggest problem is the contempt for a consecrated usage that does not affront grammar. Napoleon, come on. Sadder is to see that a dictionary like Houaiss is still in this today.

Some flexibility would perhaps be advisable. It would reflect approval, by other grammarians, of the way usage has chosen. Domingos Paschoal Cegalla (1920-2013) states: “It should be noted that, although correct, the phrase ‘at home’ is divorced from current language”.

In Portugal the “a” is assimilated. There is trouble with the lack of the article: we should say “delivery at home” or “at home”. We have someone to pull.

According to an old maxim, language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The ultra-conservatism that sustains the know-it-all vision does not reach such power, but it has an institutional dimension and an entire editorial and teaching market around public tenders.

It is not easy to understand the persistence of frivolities such as sabichonism in the Brazilian cultural landscape. It seems likely that a certain morbid love for baccalaureate enters into the equation, for the ornamental verb as an emblem of distinction in a violently divided society.

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