Newsletter 011
This or That 1/4: Linkin Park — In/On/At the End
In the end, it doesn’t even matter… Well, it most certainly does, Linkin Park gentlemen! And we’ll show you just why.
Welcome to the new series where we will help you with some common mistakes and give you tips on how to remember the choice to be made. What’s important is to make your own simple rules or simplify the existing ones in order to remember them more vividly. Create your own map, picture, example, etc., but make sure that it is either funny or personal as it will be hard to memorize it otherwise.
For starters, when it comes to time, it is fairly easy to remember the distinction:
AT — time (hours): at 5 a.m., at 1 o’clock;
ON — days of the week, dates: on Monday, on 4th July, on Sunday, on June 15;
IN — everything else.
A thing to remember — the more precise you are with the reference, the closer it gets to the tip of the pyramid:
*exceptions: AT the weekend, AT night.
When it comes to space, we will create the basic rules first:
ON — on top of something (roof, floor, mountain, table, etc.);
IN — inside of something (a four-wall room, space with imaginary borders, etc.);
AT — not IN, not ON; a third option (near something).
This spatial differentiation is not as easy to remember as the previous temporal one, but it’s a start. Now, let’s add some comparisons:
- AT home vs. IN the house
- Home is not just the house, it is the back/front yard and the people, too.
- A house is a building with four walls. - IN the north vs. ON the north side
- Sides of the world are seen as space with virtual borders between them, so, e.g. a person can be INSIDE of the space that is between north-west and north-east (I am in the north.)
- To use ON, we need a reference (side, mountain, etc.) that will allow us to use it. - IN vs. ON the phone/computer/internet/website
- Electronic devices and “spaces” almost always go with ON. (I saw a funny photo on my iPhone.)
- IN the phone means INSIDE of it or any other electronic device, so we need to open it up and look for some parts within. (When they opened it, they found a hair in my phone.) - IN vs. ON the picture
- Dust is on top of the picture.
- A picture is seen as a window into space that we can look in. (That’s me with my sister jumping into the pool in this photo.)
Last, but certainly not least, is the hook from the title of this newsletter — the difference between IN the end vs. AT the end vs. ON the end.
- AT the end OF something. We need a context when we use AT:
At the beginning of this newsletter, you will see the introduction.
At the end of the sprint, we analyzed the backlog. - IN the end. That’s it — there is no specific reference:
We discussed the new project and, in the end, we decided to start next week.
In the end, the client changed their mind. - ON — we don’t use it in this context. One option less to worry about!
The same thing works for beginning or any other similar contexts:
- In the beginning, I thought I should use AT.
- I mean, at the beginning of this newsletter, many things were not clear.
- Finally, I realized that I need to put AT at the end of a specific context.
- In the end, it really matters which option I need to use.
At the beginning of July 2020, Linkin Park’s song In the End reached 1 billion views on Youtube. Today, we thank them for helping us learn about this important grammatical lesson. Who knew it could be this useful?!
Enjoy this 2018 trap remix of the song selected by the author of this newsletter and a life-long LP fan.
Until next week,
Take care!
