The study of gaffe in Singapore.

The second gaffe that we chose to look at is Help

arrived just on time! According to the speak good
English movement, the correct preposition to be
used in this situation is help arrived just in time.

Before going further, we decided to look at various

meanings of the two prepositions. According to the
Cambridge dictionary, both words have definitions
in relation to time. In meaning during a period of
time and on meaning when something happens.
That created the contention between in time and
on time.

As this is from the Singapore context, we decided

to use the global web corpus. According to the
corpus, Just on time is less common than just in
time. The frequency of the latter which is
prescribed to be the correct grammar is 80 times
more used than the former across all countries.
This adverbial is also commonly used to modify the
verb ‘arrive’. When we did a search for all
inflexions of the word arrive with Just in time and
just on time, we found this data on the corpus.
Arrive just on time is rarely used on the web across
all countries. Singapore happens to be the heaviest
user with 23% of the total 13 data we found. On
the other hand, arrive just in time had a higher
frequency on the web-based data. It is 20 times
more. Majority of it used by the Americans and
British.

We decided to fine-tune our search to on time and

in time. From the global web corpus, we find that
there are more data. There were 1.64% more uses
of on time than in time. Granted this is a negligible
difference but it also suggests that using on time to
modify verbs, in this case ‘arrive’, is not necessarily
wrong.

We also conducted the same search in the

American and British corpus. Here shows the
results from American corpus where there are 269
uses of arrive in time in its various inflections and
251 uses of arrive on time in its various inflections.
This 7% difference is too marginal to suggest that
the former is more correct than the latter.
However, we can conclude that the seemingly
equal number in frequency suggests that both are
correct.

Such a phenomenon is also evident among British

speakers when we did a search in the British corpus.
There were equal number of uses of arrive in time
and arrive on time seemingly to insinuate that in
and on could be interchangeable prepositions to
modify the verb in relation to time.

Over the years there had been a 27% decrease in

the use of in time but a 46% increase in the use of
on time from the early 1990s to the 2019. This
shows that the adverbial ‘on time’ has increasingly
become more commonly used and generally
accepted by native speakers.

Here, I have a few questions I would like to go

through. I will be reading the sentences using the
two different prepositions. Please listen carefully.

Did the use of either preposition change the

fundamental meaning of each sentence? Some of
you may disagree with what we are driving at but I
would like to leave you with a thought. Are we
teaching language and grammar for students to
abide by a set of outdated prescriptive rules or to
simply communicate and understand each other?