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Fatimah0786 Posted 12 years ago
Grammar

Usage of 'at the brink of'

Is this correct?: "One should not say mean things about someone who is at the brink of his/her downfall".

Thanks.
  

Top answer

Hi, The right preposition is "on", therefore, your sentence should read, One should not say mean things about someone who is on the brink of his/her downfall. Hamid

— Hrsanei

  • Hi, The right preposition is "on", therefore, your sentence should read, One should not say mean things about someone who is on the brink of his/her downfall.
  • Hamid
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4 Answers
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Hi,
The right preposition is "on", therefore, your sentence should read,
One should not say mean things about someone who is on the brink of his/her downfall.

Hamid
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Thanks for answering. I found hits for 'at the brink of' here on google n gram: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=at+the+brink+of&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothi
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Apparently, I was wrong and "at" can be used as well, but I believe "on the brink" is more common.
Hamid
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fatimah0786Is this correct?: "One should not say mean things about someone who is at the brink of his/her downfall".Thanks.
The prepositions with "brink" have the following relative frequency (American Corpus)
on (1281)
to (540)
(back) from (268)
at (111)
over (46)

and a few others that are quite infrequent.

So, even th
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