Home sweet office

Of course, prepositions in English do change over time, often in ways that befuddle traditionalists. “Forbidden to” is the usual combination, but “forbidden from” is gaining ground despite its vocal critics. There are 20-year-old Americans who don’t even know that “bored of” is a recent twist on the old standards “bored with” and “bored by.”

Unlike these variants, “working from home” isn’t actually a new combination. But it has made a much more dramatic change than any of those minor preposition switches: Over the past century, “working from home” has completely reversed its sense. To our English-speaking forebears, it meant “working away from home.”

This use of “from,” all by itself, to mean “away from, apart from, absent from,” dates to the 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Samuel Johnson used it his poem “London,” warning of the hazards of venturing out at night: “Sign your will, before you sup from home.” And in “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens had Charles Darnay say to Lucie Manette’s father, “I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her being from home, to beg to speak to you.”

During the 19th century, “working from home” meant “working outside the home”: “My father, who was a tailor, and worked from home, now took me with him as his assistant,” reads an 1847 account. A report to Britain’s House of Commons, in 1874, concluded that “when mothers are working from home, families must be neglected.” And a listing of accidental deaths, published in 1897, noted that when a man did not return from a day of fishing, “his family was not alarmed about him, as he was in the habit of working from home.”