For or To

Adrian   Sun Oct 16, 2005 5:10 am GMT
Which is correct:

I am late to class OR I am late for class?
Someone   Sun Oct 16, 2005 5:35 am GMT
Both.
Lazar   Sun Oct 16, 2005 5:57 am GMT
I think I would only ever say "late for class".
Someone   Sun Oct 16, 2005 11:24 am GMT
Well, "I was late to class." sounds perfectly fine to me.
Frances   Sun Oct 16, 2005 9:02 pm GMT
I've never heard of the first version.
Anthony   Sun Oct 16, 2005 10:24 pm GMT
technically, "late" is an adjective, so i think "i was late to class" is not correct because "i was to class" isn't either.
Anthony   Sun Oct 16, 2005 10:32 pm GMT
then again, never mind, "i was for class" doesn't sound right either really. i guess you can't gauge it this way.
Ecko   Sun Oct 16, 2005 11:52 pm GMT
Just use the latter
Tiffany   Mon Oct 17, 2005 1:13 am GMT
Interchangeable to me.
Travis   Mon Oct 17, 2005 2:36 am GMT
For me, the two are completely interchangeable, and if one replaced "was" with "came", I would actually then strongly favor "to".

>>technically, "late" is an adjective, so i think "i was late to class" is not correct because "i was to class" isn't either.<<

The "technically" part you speak of here is pure prescriptivism, which has no bearing when it comes to actual real-world speech patterns and not the arbitrary edicts of grammarians.
Anthony   Mon Oct 17, 2005 4:34 am GMT
>>The "technically" part you speak of here is pure prescriptivism, which has no bearing when it comes to actual real-world speech patterns and not the arbitrary edicts of grammarians.<<

i do agree that the "technically" part which i spoke of was prescriptivism's doctrine, but i wouldn't go so far as to suggest that they are arbitrary edicts of grammarians - that'd be way too much a generalization if it is the realm of philosophy of language that you want to go into rather than just lingustics'.
Someone   Mon Oct 17, 2005 11:51 pm GMT
Google search on "late to class" returns 151,000 thousand results. "Late for class" gives 161,000. So, I maintain either is perfectly fine.
Someone   Mon Oct 17, 2005 11:53 pm GMT
I didn't mean to write out "thousand" after the number.
Uriel   Tue Oct 18, 2005 2:48 am GMT
I think you can use it either way.
Heehee   Thu Oct 20, 2005 3:59 pm GMT
Haiii, sou desu!!! That's right, the two are interchangeable, and I hear people using both all the time.

Just a random piece of trivia...
In Hong Kong, the urban MTR railway service uses the announcement:
"The train to ______ is arriving"
whereas the suburban KCR railway service announcement states:
"The train for ______ is arriving"

And just for the record, the MTR announcer has a perfect RP accent whereas the KCR announcer has some sort of robotic Chinese accent ^.~