Word Watch: Into
This innocent preposition has undergone an extraordinary journey over the last half-century.
“I was very into curating and collecting” – Christopher Bastin, artistic director of the fashion house Gant, Spring 2023.
I can’t help being delighted and appalled at the same time by the extraordinary journey this innocent preposition “into” has undergone over the last half-century.
Like many English prepositions, it has been hauled about all over the place in many syntactical contexts, but to find it standing proud as an adjective in its own right, with its own superlative – “very” - as well, takes one by surprise.
For comparison, take another preposition, “round” and treat it the same way. If you turn “round” into its comparative, “rounder”, or superlative, “roundest”, you have performed some neat sleight of hand, smuggling an adjective into the place of the preposition. If you speak of “the roundest ball”, you are describing the ball’s shape, not its position. To describe where the ball is, you would choose another word, say “nearest” - near being a preposition denoting place.
“Into” is similarly a preposition denoting place, with a strong implication of movement from one point to another, either physical or conceptual: “the ball bounced into the water”; “I could see into his mind”. That “into”, as in my first example, can mean or connote a static condition or state is new in our language, a colloquialism that derives from “pop’” culture of the 1970s or thereabouts. I might unsurprisingly guess that it was of American origin, but it could have emerged on either side of the Atlantic, so interwoven and mutually dependent are British and American English now (and we should never exclude Antipodean idioms from these speculations).
But so strong is the presence of that sense of movement in the word “into”, we feel the need of a concrete word, a substantive, indicating or implying a location towards which the preposition moves. In other words, “into” requires a context, a “notional” subject and object.
Well, in Mr Bastin’s formulation, the subject is clear enough: it’s himself: “I”. His sentence goes on to give us a verb too: the past tense of “to be”: “I was”. Next follows an intensifier or superlative: “very”, which we expect will be the precursor to an adjective: “happy”, say, or “angry”. The next word, “very”, might also be part of a qualifying phrase, such as “very much”, which would also lead to an adjective, such as “surprised” or an adjectival phrase like “taken aback”.
Nothing of the kind. The next word is that maverick preposition, that I’ve been trying to analyse: “into”, without any suggestion of movement towards. In fact, it seems to be serving as an indicator of place, a place already arrived at. And we’re now told that the place in question is “curating and collecting”: a pair of present participles that stand for ongoing activities that the writer is “into”.
These are the objects of the preposition, and “into” has to do quite a lot of work explaining the relationship of subject and object. How physical or conceptual that “movement towards” is, we aren’t told, but the intensifier “very” gives us permission, I think, to interpret the phrase generously. We infer that Mr Bastin indulges in a lot of “collecting”. Perhaps he is similarly enthusiastic about “curating” – but the precise meaning of that word in this context is something we could debate - and that is another story. (I discussed “curate” on 28 October 2023).