en » on, in
Spotted in the wild:
- “4. pause made on route: a place where a bus or a train regularly pauses on its route” (link)
- “News : UCE LECTURER ON ROUTE TO WIN NATIONAL TEACHING AWARD” (link)
- “I have titled my remarks, ‘In Route to the Presidency: Some Ideas of Mine.’” (link)
- “So why, other than a liberal media’s pro-gay sensibilities, would the camera crews descend on masse in Laramie but not on Rogers, Arkansas, where Jesse Dirkhising suffocated to death while his assailant had a sandwich?” (National Review Online, March 23, 2001)
- “It’s horrifying to think that is was only fifty years ago that people in Western countries were being treated so savagely, that even young children were being killed on mass just because of their religious beliefs.” (link)
- “The world is, unfortunately, FILLED with dictators and/or terrorists who kill on mass and at will.” (villagesoup.com, Sep 16, 2005)
Analyzed or reported by:
- David Fenton (Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, 22 September 2005)
- MWDEU (Article on "en route")
- Paul Brians (Common Errors in English)
David Fenton asked Chris Waigl and me: “Is there a mixed usage of “en route”, “in route” and “on route” that is common, or am I hearing a connection between three independent phrases that doesn’t really exist?” It turns out that the “on” and “in” variants of the French “en” are very frequent indeed; raw Google web hits for “— route to” on 22 September 2005:
en route to: 5,930,000
on route to: 265,000
in route to: 192,000
A quick glance at a sampling of the “on” and “in” examples should convince anyone that these expressions are synonymous. The version with “in” translates the French literally. The version with “on” is an especially good translation of French “en”, since it occurs with the English noun “route” in expressions like “on the/our route to Vancouver” (where French “en” is just unacceptable, in writing or speech). Note the nice juxtaposition of “on route” with “on its route” in the first cite above, from the MSN Encarta dictionary’s entry for the noun “stop”. In any case, both “on” and “in” represent attempts to Anglicize, and make sense of, the French expression, and both are phonologically very close to French “en”.
This reshaping seems to have gotten by under almost everybody’s radar (neither of the Anglicized variants is in the current OED, and even Garner doesn’t complain about them), though at least two of the standard sources mention it: Brians instructs us not to Anglicize “en” in “en route” as “in”, and MWDEU has an unusually stern entry labeling “on route” as an “embarrassing error” and cautioning: “Authors and proofreaders beware.” (Brians doesn’t mention the “on” variant, and MWDEU doesn’t mention the “in” variant.) Despite them, I think that these variants are fast edging into the mainstream.
[CW, 2005/09/27: Added “on mass(e)”, as suggested by Sandi in the comment section. The partially Anglicised form “on masse” might simply be a misspelling of the French preposition en, though.]