Word Play: There’s more to “there”

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming up next: a tribute to one of the smallest—and most useful—words in the English language. You probably used it several times already today without even noticing. Here’s WORLD commentator George Grant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word there. Surprisingly, it is one of the most versatile linguistic tools we have in the English language. Not to be confused with its homophones, their, a possessive meaning “belonging to them,” or they’re, a contraction meaning “they are,” there, t-h-e-r-e, is usually either an adverb referring to a location (“it’s over there”) or a pronoun introducing a sentence (“there once was a ship that put to sea”). But sometimes it is also used as an indefinite grammatical subject (“fool there was”), or as an expression of consolation (“there there), or as an emphatic declaration (“there, finally done”), or as a casual form of address (hey there).

One of the more unusual uses of the word though is as a pronominal adverb functioning as an abbreviation to replace a preposition and a noun. It was this use of there that really got me going down this obscure grammatical rabbit trail: during my Bible reading one morning I kept noticing words like thereabout, thereat, thereby, therefore, therefrom, and therein. And that was just the start. There was thereof, thereon, thereout, thereunto, thereupon, and therewith.

I then began to think of all the great passages given form and heft by this versatile word: “Let there be light,” “And there was evening and there was morning,” “Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth,” “There is a balm in Gilead,” “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,” “There is none like You, O Lord, nor are there any works like Yours,” “And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field,” “Jesus rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm,” “There they crucified Him,” “Peter went into the tomb and saw the linen cloths lying there,” “Suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind,” “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved,” “And He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore.”

The word first passed into Old English by at least the 8th or 9th century as a pure locative adverb from the Anglo-Saxon Proto-German. But already by the 10th or 11th century it had begun to diversify acquiring new and varied uses, becoming a kind of handy linguistic Swiss Army Knife.

Just think of all the ways we now use there colloquially in our everyday speech: “it’s neither here nor there,” “hang in there,” “then and there,” “there and then,” “there be dragons,” “there’s no place like home,” “halfway there,” “there’s something in the air,” “there and back again,” “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” “there goes the neighborhood,” “there comes a time,” “there are no Atheists in foxholes,” “so there!”

Ever since one of my seminary professors first posed the question of a text, “What’s the therefore there for?” I’ve tried to make note of these sorts of obscure details. But I’m going to have to leave it there for now, even though there is so much more to explore. There you have it.

I’m George Grant.

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