in the UK we would say:...who's this "we", white man?
hi, F!I don't agree it's as straightforward as that. Surely you can recognise the range of legitimate variants like these:
1. "Two cars and a bus collided in the High Street today"
2. "Two cars and a bus collided on the M4 today"
Similarly we could find without surprise these sentences in any UK publication:
3. "Seventeen shops in central Croydon closed last year"
4. "Seventeen shops on Pembury Hill closed last year"
We might find these forms in daily speech:
5. “The car was standing at the corner outside Woolworths”
6. “The woman was standing on the corner outside Woolworths”
I don’t pretend to have any special powers of observation in these matters, but I can certainly observe quite a wide range of options being exercised by English mother-tongue speakers around me – and I am uncertain how dogmatic we can be about what (if any) discriminations are being made.
This is instinctive to most speakers, and we all have I think a range of styles, which have areas of confusion but some general sense of relationships. Personally, I travel
in my car to the station, then go
on the train into London - I disembark
at the station, alighting
on the platform.
To my ear, the use of
in suggests a complete logical subset – the milk is in the jug. Conversely, the use of
on suggests a less detailed relationship – the jug is on the shelf. The use of
at suggests a clearly known point in space or time – the shelf is at worktop height.
