A couple years ago, while reading something or other on the web, I noticed the author wrote that he had been “standing on line” somewhere or other in real life. I assumed this was just a typo and went on with my life. A couple months later, I noticed that somebody else had written much the same thing on an entirely different web site; he had been “standing on line” — not “in line,” but “on line.” Although two data points don’t imply a trend, I began to suspect these were no mere typos — although at the time I assumed it was maybe some gradually creeping linguistic confusion between “in line,” as for people in a queue, and “on line,” as for Internet usage, or in a mechanical sense (something functioning correctly could be said to be “on line”).
The next few times I noticed the “on line” wording, it hit me that every one of them was written by somebody from New York. I decided it was probably a regional dialect, although I was surprised I had never seen (or at least noticed) it earlier than a couple years prior.
So a few days ago at work I was proofreading a page and found the “standing on line” phrase in an article. I knew I had to fix it, but decided I needed to find precedent first rather than assuming my bias was correct. I mean, what if it turned out I had been using the phrase incorrectly my entire life? Like all those horrifying years I spent pronouncing “subsequent” as sub-SEE-kwent.
The AP Stylebook appeared to be silent on the matter, but a quick Google search gave me what I was looking for. First, a reference from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English:
For now, to stand or wait in line is Standard. New Yorkers used to be the only Americans who spoke of waiting or standing on line, and then other Americans began to pick up the locution, but a completely new recent use for on line may bring that development to a halt: on line also means “directly connected to a computer,” as in My printer is now on line and ready to print. This sense began by being jargon, but it is now Conversational at the very least, and it may shortly be fully Standard.
Then I found a Columbia Journalism Review column quoting the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage on the matter:
As Wendy Bryan, a Web specialist at the Columbia Journalism School, noted, “online” (one word) has become a noun and adjective for the Internet universe. But she was puzzled when she read about someone who “stood on line at the bank machine,” and wondered, “Do I get behind those on line, or may I remain in line?” “On line” is apparently a regionalism; The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage declares: “Few besides New Yorkers speak of standing on line. Follow the usage of the rest of the English-speaking world: in line.” The “on” version may be spreading, but “in” is still the unassailable choice.
A Harvard Gazette article on regionalisms included “on line” briefly:
New York City is another place where unique speech patterns frequently occur. Some, like stoop (the steps leading up to the front door) are holdovers from when New York was the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. Others like “I stood on line” rather than the far more common “I stood in line” are of mysterious origin.
It also features as a question in the Dialect Survey organized by a Harvard professor,
Although I was happy to have a minor, periodically nagging question answered at last, it didn’t occur to me to turn this into a blog entry until tonight, when I watched The Trip Back and heard Florrie Fisher say the same thing. This serves as official confirmation that “standing on line” was a regionalism long before the Internet, or even widespread computer usage, came about.
It appears this may even be a British (or Canadian?) regionalism — although the source seems unsure
