Meet the preposition

hanck grammarians I want to talk about prepositions but before I do I'm going to draw you a little hamster is the hamster is it a tiny bear who knows we're just going to call it a hamster a little little rodent type creature now I'm going to use this critter to establish what prepositions are and what they do because in addition to there being a hamster there's also going to be this this box so what prepositions do is they establish relationships between stuff in place and time so it can show it can show us where things are when things are and how things are let me let me demonstrate so okay so using just this hamster and this box we can move this box around and talk about how the hamster relates to the box right so right now the box is under the hamster let's write that down right the box is under the hamster that word under is a preposition because it's establishing this relationship of where it's connecting the box to the hamster the box is under a hamster but if I move it up like so now we can say the box is over the hamster but let's get rid of the box and let's imagine that our hamster is having a midlife crisis and our hamster decides it's going to go out and it's going to splurge on a fabulous new hat just an enormous top hat a little band in the center just a big old silly Abe Lincoln style stovepipe top hat now another use for prepositions is we can talk about when things are in relation to each other so I could say before the hamster got the hat and after the hamster got a hat right and these words after and before expressed relationships in time but another interesting thing that prepositions can do is they can also help express how something is or how its what it's for what its use is you know so we could say that you know this hat is for parties or is for wearing at parties oh and at also is a preposition this hat is for wearing at parties so this is the the how and this part is the where so what's the purpose of the Hat well we establish that with the word for the hat is for wearing where is it supposed to be worn at parties that's the where we can also use a word like of to express the the how relationship and that's that's just sort of to say what belongs to whom so we could say you know that is the Hat of the hamster that is the Hat of the hamster so that's what prepositions are in the most basic sense they can help you figure out what the relationship is between two things in time and space you know or or how one thing relates to another so you can figure out when where and how using prepositions you can learn anything Dave it out