Distinguishing between prepositions of place and prepositions of time

I WAS thinking of presenting some very interesting responses to my open letter last week on dubious stories in Philippine media that Filipino women have the world’s smallest breasts , but an incredibly unbelievable language-related story came up in the news—that the charming July 19 Republican convention speech by Melania Trump, wife of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, had plagiarized almost word-for-word some passages from the speech of now American First Lady Michelle Obama in 2008 during the Democratic convention that nominated her husband for the American presidency.

This is the kind of news story that every columnist on language would be loath to miss commenting on, so I immediately started jotting down notes on how that highly improbable event—an event that the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a “Black Swan” in his nonfiction book of the same title—could have happened. But in just a little over an hour, cable news and social media began exploding in a frenzy of savage commentary about that speech. Indeed, to be honest about it, there’s hardly anything left anymore that I could write with enough enthusiasm about the topic.