dumb and dumber to — the preposition i still do not understand

dumb and dumber to is a preposition i still do not understand. mom called on a sunday and tried to explain it. stefan upstairs slammed a door in agreement. the spare key dave lost is somewhere between aisle nine and a hot dog stand. the doctor visit accomplished nothing today.

which is to say: i went into a doctor’s office on a tuesday morning, came out with a paper cup of water and zero answers, and the only word that kept rotating in my head, on the elevator down, was the word to. not the number two. the preposition. the small one. the one that pretends to be a destination and is, in practice, a question.

writing this from the desk on a tuesday after the appointment. carla is upstairs in the budget reforecast, which by my reading of her calendar runs until lunch and then some.

so. dumb and dumber to. not dumb and dumber 2. not dumb and dumber: the second one. to. with one o. as a preposition. as in heading-toward, as in directed-at, as in the small word my third-grade teacher asked us to underline in a sentence about a man going to the store, where, as it happens, he forgot what he was buying. the title, on its own, is a 2014 sequel directed by the farrelly brothers, and it is also, structurally, a homophone joke that the marketing department either understood completely or accidentally clicked into and decided to keep. i lean toward accidentally. that is, in fact, the entire spiritual register of the franchise. for the broader category this film sits inside, see the larger pillar i drafted at this same desk on what dumb means in plain language; this post is the satellite that landed on the preposition.

DUMB AND DUMBER TO. SPELLED. WITH. ONE. O.

dumb and dumber to, the title i kept misreading

i misread the title for a decade. i would like that on the record. i thought it was dumb and dumber 2 because that is what every other sequel does. jaws 2. rocky 2. speed 2. the numeral is the universal sequel uniform. the numeral signals this is the next one, please buy a ticket. the numeral does the work of the marketing budget, free of charge.

but dumb and dumber to wears the preposition instead. to, as a preposition, is, in plain language, a tiny arrow. it points. it does not count. and the moment you stop reading it as a number and start reading it as a direction, the title turns into a fragment of a sentence — dumb and dumber to, as in dumber to where, dumber to what, dumber to whom, the sentence is incomplete on purpose, the preposition is dangling, the dumb is in the dangling. that is, in fact, the gag the original 1994 film already understood, where two men drove from rhode island to aspen with no real plan and no real destination beyond the word aspen on a slip of paper. the sequel just ports the gag into the title. the preposition is the joke. the joke is the preposition.

i have been called dumb often enough to recognise the rhythm. mom uses the word like a small kiss. dave uses it like a court ruling. the doctor i saw this morning, who does not use the word, used a synonym, and the synonym was concerning, which is, as far as i can tell, the doctor’s office word for dumb, only slightly billable.

mom called sunday, she also misread it

mom called this past sunday. mom always calls on sundays. that is the system. the call comes between two and four in the afternoon, depending on whether she has been to the garden centre or not, and the topic of the call drifts from her health, briefly, to my health, briefly, to the topic she is actually calling about, which she will reveal only in the last six minutes.

this sunday the actual topic was the film. mom, who does not stream, had seen part of it on a hotel television in 2017 and had been meaning to ask, for seven years, what it was called. she described it with a degree of accuracy that surprised me — two men, the haircuts, the dog van, the second one, the one where they’re old. i told her the second one is called dumb and dumber to, with the preposition. she said, “dumb and dumber two?” — pronouncing the two as the number. i said, no, mom, it’s to, like the small word, with one o. she said, “well that’s not a sequel, hon, that’s an unfinished sentence.” mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated. mom had, in twelve seconds, summarised the entire critical reception of the film.

she then asked me how the doctor had gone. i said the doctor had gone, technically, fine. i did not mention that the doctor had used the word concerning in three different sentences, that i had nodded at all three of them like a man nodding at a foreign menu, and that on the bus home i had stared at the word concerning on a poster for unrelated content and felt nothing in particular about it. mom does not need the full bulletin. mom needs the headline. the headline was fine.

stefan would know the grammar, allegedly

stefan lives upstairs. stefan is the kind of guy who pronounces foreign words correctly without being asked. stefan, by my reckoning, is the apartment building’s resident expert on prepositions, articles, and other small parts of speech that most of us, including me, leave on the floor of the language and step over. stefan is a category, in this newsletter — a stefan-type, the cousin’s friend who turns up at the wedding in the right shoes and corrects your wine pour without making it weird.

i did not call stefan to ask about the title. i would never call stefan. calling stefan would be an admission. but i did, briefly, on the elevator up, picture the conversation. stefan would say something like “the preposition to indicates direction or recipient; the homophone with two is exploited for comedic effect; the farrellys are cleverer than most people give them credit for”. stefan would say it in one breath. stefan would not pause for me to nod. stefan would already be on the next floor.

that night, around the time mom usually calls, stefan slammed a door upstairs. one slam. clean. punctuation, almost. i took it as agreement. i have been taking stefan’s door slams as agreement for three years. it has, in the absence of an actual conversation with stefan, kept the relationship alive.

the spare key dave lost, evidence of the to

here is the working theory. the title dumb and dumber to is, in a tiny grammatical way, the same shape as the spare key dave lost. let me explain.

i gave dave a spare key in 2021. dave lost the spare key in, as far as i can establish, 2022, somewhere between aisle nine of the supermarket and a hot dog stand he stopped at on the way to drop the key off, which he had been meaning to do since march. the key is, technically, still missing. dave maintains that the key is somewhere in the apartment and that i have been failing, repeatedly, to look in the correct drawer. i maintain that the key is somewhere in the supermarket parking lot and that the correct drawer, in this case, is the asphalt.

the spare key, like the preposition to, points at something it never actually arrives at. that is the link. the spare key was supposed to go to me. it did not. the title dumb and dumber to is supposed to go to some completion of its sentence. it does not. both are little arrows with no target. both are, in their own minor way, evidence that prepositions are the real engines of the language and that nouns get all the credit.

i, by my count, will not be getting the spare key back. dave, by his count, has not lost it. we have been holding the position for three years. it is, like the title, an unfinished sentence we have agreed to leave on the table.

the hot dog defense, briefly, since it is a sandwich

the spare key was last seen, per dave’s testimony, near a hot dog stand. that detail is, in the broader investigation, possibly the only verifiable coordinate we have. it is also, conveniently, the on-ramp to the hot take i was always going to cite in this post, because the cluster requires it and because the take is, on its own merits, defensible in any court that has met me.

a hot dog IS a sandwich. fight me. the bread holds a filling. the filling sits between two cushions of bread. the geometry is the geometry of every other sandwich in the canon. the protests come from people who think a sandwich requires two distinct slices of bread, as though the bun were a disqualification, as though the act of folding a single piece of bread around a tube of meat were somehow a different cuisine. it is not. it is sandwich engineering with a softer chassis. the dictionary i don’t trust agrees with me. the man at the bar agrees with me. dave, when not in transit between aisle nine and a hot dog stand, agrees with me. mom, on this one, abstains.

verdict, the preposition is the joke

so where does that leave us. the title is a preposition. the preposition is a small arrow. the arrow points at a sentence the film never finishes. that, structurally, is the joke. that, philosophically, is also a fairly accurate map of how my week has gone, which began with a doctor saying concerning three times, continued with mom on the phone misreading a film title, ended with stefan slamming a door upstairs in what i chose to interpret as a thumbs up, and is, as i write this, still missing a spare key somewhere in a supermarket parking lot near a hot dog stand. the preposition is everywhere. the preposition is, in fact, the year.

i will probably watch the film again this weekend, which i could not bring myself to do for the original review of the rest of the cluster, including the recent piece i drafted on the title-with-the-numeral-instead. that one was about the rewatch and the seventh microwave’s brief crisis. this one is about the small word with one o. they are not the same post. the title is the difference. the title is, also, the joke.

somebody in the household genre has to do this kind of work, and apparently that somebody is me. for the calibration of how dumb i actually am, on a scale, by metrics, see the eleven-question diagnostic i wrote at this same desk to assess the household register of dumb; the present post is the cousin that argues the question is, itself, badly worded.

this is, by the way, the kind of preposition-thinking that travels poorly. when i first watched karl pilkington shuffle through wonders of the world looking faintly betrayed by every horizon, the abroad in the title was doing the same trick — a small word standing in for an entire mood, an idiot pointed at a continent and the continent declining to comment. abroad is a preposition-adjacent word. abroad is what happens when the arrow lands somewhere unfamiliar. the preposition to, in the title of the sequel, is the version that never lands at all.

i hit snooze nine times this morning before the doctor’s appointment. nine. i had set the alarm for 7am. i made it out of bed at 8:21. the snooze button, on an old phone, does nine minutes per tap, which means i had, in technical terms, slept through eighty-one minutes of intentional small naps. the doctor noticed. the doctor said i looked tired. the doctor was correct. the doctor did not, however, ask me about my preposition theory of sequel titles. that is, frankly, on the doctor.

carla just walked past the desk on her way to the printer. the tab was already minimised. small win. the standing desk, as ever, did not betray me.

the new microwave is still the seventh

the seventh microwave is, this morning, behaving. the lasagne, last night, came out warm. sparky the fork is, as always, in the drawer with the black mark on one tine. mom is, by sunday’s reckoning, fine. stefan upstairs is, by his door’s reckoning, also fine. dave is, last we spoke, still confident that the spare key will turn up in a drawer i have somehow refused to check. the doctor will, in approximately two weeks, send a letter. the letter will, in approximately two more weeks, be opened.

that is, by my count, more loose ends than any sane person should hold. but the title of the film, with its preposition, gave me permission to leave them loose. the arrow does not have to land. the sentence does not have to finish. the spare key does not have to be found.

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