What's a preposition when it's at home?

How much do you remember about being taught parts of speech in school? Or, indeed, how much were you taught to begin with?

You may be confident with nouns—people, places, things—and sure-footed about verbs being actions. Differentiating adjectives and adverbs might be a bit trickier. But what about prepositions? Could you pick one out of a lineup?

Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby has an excellent (and hilarious) anecdote about her teacher attempting quite poorly to teach her about prepositions in her show Douglas. Hopefully I can do a better job of it!

So what is a preposition, anyway?

A preposition describes the relationship a noun has with something else; usually, it tells us where the noun sits in space and time.

The key is in the second part of the word: “position”. Any words like “in”, “behind”, or “under” that describe the spatial relationship of the noun with its environment is a preposition. Likewise, prepositions also include words that describe the noun’s relationship with time, such as “before”, “after”, and “until”, as well as more directly relational words such as “for”, “to”, and “of”.

The actual preposition itself kicks off a prepositional phrase, which is the whole description of the noun’s relationship. Some examples are:

Before the war, the kingdoms shared a bustling trade.

The penguin is in the box.

Call me in the morning, and we’ll go out to a movie.

It wasn’t until after the party that I noticed the spinach in my teeth.

The cat under the table glowered at the one on the chair.

There’s an old adage admonishing us not to end sentences with prepositions (“Now there’s a cause worth fighting for!”), but it’s more relevant to Latin than it is to English, so I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.

No go forth, and preposition with impunity!

Happy writing, friends.