The preposition ‘at’ in English is a funny kind of preposition. I can make an equally strong case in my head for not having it in the language as for keeping it firmly where it belongs. If I give too much thought to one side of the argument, that’s the way the pendulum swings at that particular time.
A friend once told me that a local newspaper printed her father’s obituary saying he had died of a heart attack in the Whitstable harbour. The information was only partly true. He died of a heart attack at Whitstable Harbour. He was walking along the quayside when the fatal attack struck and he fell over. Crucially, he didn’t fall into the water – he fell on the ground.
I was reminded of this story the other day while listening to a report about miners trapped in a coalmine in Chile. The news reader said, as one would expect, that the BBC reporter was at the time ‘at the coalmine’ from where he sent the report. Had he been ‘in the coalmine’, he wouldn’t have been able to file the report, of course.
The distinction between ‘in’ and ‘at’ is necessary, but, pointless as it is, it is interesting to speculate by what reasoning our ancestors arrived at it. Were they thinking: ‘in’ for things being inside, and ‘at’ for things being … well, precisely, inside, outside, beside, neither here nor there, kind of generally in the vicinity? Or perhaps: we’ve got most relations covered by now, but where no preposition seems to fit, ‘at’ is the default option. Or maybe, after the fashion of Donald Rumsfeld: there are named and unnamed relations, and of the unnamed ones there are those we know to exist and those we don’t know to exist, and those that we don’t know we don’t know to exist, and them perhaps are best left to ‘at’.
It would seem that ‘on the top rung of the ladder’ was prior to ‘at the top of the ladder’ if we adopt the Darwinian view of language evolution: more complex concepts come after simpler concepts. The concept ‘at the top of the ladder’ is more complex because it is more ambiguous: we can mean the top rung or the second rung from the top, or perhaps even the third rung down from the top one, if the ladder is sufficiently long.
It is easy to see that ‘at’ cannot be a favourite of logicians and mathematicians. It is not precise enough. In a world consisting of objects in a plane, with no value attached to the objects (cones, cubes, spheres, etc), there is no place for relations involving ‘at’. All relations can be handled by: next to, to the left of, to the right of, over, under, etc. However, having said that, what about two non-parallel lines which meet ‘at’ point A? Well, then we come to what a point is in geometry. The point is usually left undefined. But if we try to define it, say, a set of coordinates in the Cartesian system or a circle of radius 0, then we get very precise indeed, and that in turn conflicts with our intuitive understanding of ‘at’, which is used for imprecise descriptions. A vicious circle.
Prepositions have fixed opposites: in / out, on / off, over / under, to / from, or context-dependent opposites: across, through, along, around, etc. What is the opposite of ‘at’? I can’t really say that the opposite of ‘I’ll meet you at the theatre’ is ‘I’ll meet you inside the theatre’.
There is a sense in which ‘in’ meets ‘at’ and a sense in which it doesn’t. Some distinctions seem to me to have very little basis indeed, like ‘arrive at’ and ‘arrive in’. The most satisfying test in choosing between ‘in’ and ‘at’ is to look at the implications: the Whitstable and Chile examples above, or ‘spent a lot of time in the sea’, so suffers from hypothermia; ‘spent a lot of time at sea’, so feels homesick, and so on, but that doesn’t change the fact that I feel kind of rudderless with ‘at’ and at sea without it.