Stylin'
Long before Crazy Frog Whoomp gave us "There It Is," the silent film comic genius Charles R. Bowers used his face and body to tell the audience a similar thing. The 19-minute classic film comedy There It Is (1928) has no subject really, but hilarity nonetheless ensues, which is kind of the point of this week's editorial (without the hilarity). There, as used in these titles, is really not a part of speech. So if it's not a part of our speech, what exactly is this thingy? Webster calls it an "anticipatory subject," but really we use there to keep us from talking like Yoda: "Goes, it does," or worse, "Is, it is."
"There" is actually a lot easier to use if you don't think about it too much. Try it as a pronoun: "The troll warned me not to go into the woods, but I went there anyway." Easy. But, the situation becomes mind-bogglingly difficult to nail down when a writer uses the word in its most common form, as a way of saying nothing. There is no way out of this puzzle.
English is hard because it is old and because it came from an island. For long stretches of
time, the folks who lived on that wonderful green island were isolated from their neighbors and other seafaring, language-bringing hordes. But, then again, once in a while, those same hordes landed on said fair isle and insisted upon bringing their languages with them. Our "anticipatory subject" culprit arrived in modern English because of two incursions of Latin: Caesar's Roman Latin and Norman French.
For example, Saxon King Ethelred the Unready (978-1016 C.E.) could have written (had he known how to write in modern English) the sentence: "So many of them were." And, folks would have known that he was talking about a lot of people being present. Today, we use the anticipatory subject there to make it clearer to our post-Latin minds: "There were many,” or “Many were there."
Basically, the word "there" comes from a deep, dark place in the history of English - probably the same place as our friend the troll. Some-when, someone decided that evolutionary English had to fit Latin grammar, probably close on after Will the Conqueror arrived in 1066 C.E. with his Frisian-influenced Medieval French-speaking Norman hordes. So, Latin mostly controls English grammar. But, Ethelred's "so many of them were" (although it works perfectly well in Caesar's leftover Latin) just needed something else. Enter the anticipatory subject there, as in, "OMG, there were so many knights in that horde of Normans."
The point? Next week we'll tackle homophones, and "there" is one of everyone's favorites. Consider this a preemptive grammar strike: Putting the English word "there" through the cheese grater of Latin simply leaves a mess on the countertop that no one wants to clean up. Thus, English has invented the dubious designation "anticipatory subject." In the archaeology of the English language, sometimes we turn up helpful artifacts whose origins continue to be buried somewhere else. Live with it we must.