Jack’s question after my last column—is it correct to say “Where is it at?”—takes me back to my childhood visits with my grandparents, who lived in a small town on the edge of the coal mines in eastern Pennsylvania. I can still clearly hear their next-door neighbor screaming to someone else in her house, “Where are you at?” At the time, I lived in a suburb of New York City, where this particular construction was unknown. So also was “Hi, ya,” a typical greeting in my grandparents’ town and one that I'm told was among the first words I spoke. When I returned home from summers spent in Pennsylvania, it would take several weeks for the regional dialect to fade from my speech.

The marvelous multivolume Dictionary of American Regional English, edited by Frederic Cassidy, says, in the entry for at, that it is used redundantly, usually at the end of a where clause, in the South and Midland part of the U.S. and labels it informal, occasionally jocular or for emphasis. So the construction is certainly found in informal speech in some parts of the country. The dictionary, known to wordsmiths as DARE, is an amazing compendium of regional word usage that has taken decades to produce and will not be complete until the final volume, Sl-Z, comes out next year.

Another similar phrase, perhaps more widely heard, is the idiomatic “where it’s at,” a slang expression that gained popularity in the hippie era and in the 1990s became the title of a Beck single as well as the title for a Michael Quinion "World Wide Words" column on the use of the “at” symbol. According to Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary the expression means

Thanks for asking the question, Jack. It’s been interesting to answer. My advice would be to refrain from tacking an unnecessary at on to the end of questions starting with where, but to feel free to be hip and use “where it’s at”—in moderation, of course.

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