about 1. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993

Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.

about 1 (adv., prep.)


serves frequently as a qualifier: The train was very crowded, but somewhere about Cleveland we were able to get dinner. They were about ready to call the police. When numbers are involved, about serves similarly: There were about a thousand spectators at the game. It was about 6:45 when we reached home. All these uses are Standard, even those (as in the last example) that soften very specific numbers. At the higher levels of speech and in Formal writing, especially in expository writing, avoid the redundancy of qualification when you’ve already suggested a range, as in Anthropologists estimated that the queen was [about] forty to forty-five years old. But in Conversational levels or Informal and Semiformal writing, about sometimes effectively emphasizes an important uncertainty: I’d say she was about forty to forty-five years old.	1
Another indefiniteness appears in some sportswriters’ old-fashioned use of about to mean “around” or “somewhere in the vicinity of,” as in The thug punched him about the face and ears. Use such archaic clichés only to sound quaint.	2