If you are meeting her somewhere: at her house, at a theatre, at the mall-when you arrive at the designated spot, you say "I'm here." This is true whether or not she is already at that spot. The next sentence the first real sentence, is going to say ‘I’m staying at the Hotel Splendide and while I’m here, I want to visit the museum and the bazaar’ is it not? I might write “I always wanted to visit Ruritania and now that I’m there, blah lah lah’ and I might as easilyt say “… now that I’m here…"Įven if that wasn't just an introductory preamble, it would be subjugating meaning to strictly matched tense. That necessarily means the journey is over, else how could I have started to do things which require being comfortably somewhere, rather than travelling. To be able to write a letter home saying ‘Now that I’m here, I’m sure things will be just wonderful…’ requires that I’m physically sitting at a desk, or some such. The difference between speech and writing, oddly, is simply that it’s a lot difficult to write while still on the move. Whether it’s the threshold or the porch or the steps or the path or the lawn is rather subjective and either I’m travelling ‘there’ or I’ve arrived ‘here’. Of course from your point of view that’s ‘here’ but who's doing the talking? Until the moment I step over the threshold, I'm still going 'there.' Only after I've actually walked through the door and entered the house am I 'here'. Roughly, while I'm travelling to your house, I'm going 'there'. It will have become 'Now that I'm here, have you got the drinks ready?' or 'I'm here. Try it 25 feet from the door… and less… At some point it will no longer be 'When I get…' at all. Do I ring you and ask 'Can you get the drinks ready for when I get here?' or '… there?' Try the same question 100 yards out. The question is, at what point does the journey end? Fairly clearly, arriving early or late can make no difference so that point is not in time but in space.Ĭonsider being half a mile away from the destination. After the end of the journey, the same place is no longer a destination it's become their current location. 'After' is the key word here.įor the duration of the journey, the destination is 'there'. Everyone I can think of would normally use 'I'm there' to announce his arrival… certainly in speech and very likely in writing though it's hard to imagine a rule of grammar covering it.Ĭonsider the kids in the back of the car, constantly whining 'Are we there yet?' They mean 'Are we yet at the place we're going to,' don't they?After minutes, let alone hours or days on the road, they think of the destination as 'there' and there's a clue, even though it's obscure.
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