Someone was rattling the front door hard enough to waken me in the back bedroom. I called,

"I'm in! I'll be right out!"

    What would that statement mean to a person for whom English was not his first language? Could he up with my prepositions put?    

Of the parts of speech, prepositions are the trickiest to deal with. Some learned treatise I read recently reckons prepositions are the most fluid parts of speech. The treatise cited the losing battle teachers are waging to convince students that "different than" is incorrect. Much different from the more correct "different from".      These same teachers have been in the forefront of the war against the sentence that ends in a preposition. They're among those pleased that scripture reading is optional. "I will not leave thee until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of."   I lately lost a preposition: It hid, I thought, beneath my chair. And angrily I cried, "Perdition! Up from out of in under there!"

     Isn't that beautiful:

     Ever since I read that poem by Morris Bishop I've been trying to write one like it. No way! But I've stumbled on a game. You can play it while you're waiting in the doctor or beautician's chair. All you need is something to write on and something to write with. Oh, a dictionary will help when you want to look a word up.

     Take a word like look, or sit, or walk, or talk and fit a preposition with it in a sentence. A preposition from among the following: at, by, around, about, into, through, off, on, in, up, down, with, from, within.

     I took the verb "run" when I invented this game. I tried to make statements using it with each of the prepositions. At first I thought I was getting the run around as I ran through the list but I quickly ran down.

     It is truly remarkable how many verbs + preposition combinations make nouns. "The runaway stole a runabout after he had a run-in with his opponent who ran off at the mouth that he had also stolen the primary run-off".

     If you check your prepositions in the dictionary you are apt to find some classic such as this one in a give-away dictionary we used to keep in the glove compartment of our car.

"AT. Prep. Simple presence in, on, or by; or near to."