Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 2 August 2003

A Lexicographer writes

issue 02 August 2003

Those trained train staff have come up with a new one. Until now it has been ‘Peterborough is the next station stop with this train.’ That is a Babylonish dialect, to be sure. But today it was: ‘We shall shortly be arriving into Peterborough.’ Arriving into?

As it happens, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall in a sermon for Palm Sunday 1539 used the phrase ‘into what howse or place so ever ye shall arrive’, but I can scarcely suppose that this homiletic obiter dictum influenced the choice of preposition adopted by the conductor or train captain of the 16.32 (delayed). If it comes to that, arrive used to be a transitive verb for landing a ship or its passengers. In a narrative of Becket from about 1300 we read, if we care to, of how St Thomas ‘at Sandwyche aryved was’.

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