grammar note

Why do we get in a canoe, a taxi, or a car, but get on a bus, a ship, or a jet?

Who knows? A student asked me this once, and since then I’ve come up with a few possibilities.  

Perhaps we get in a canoe because once we are in it we pretty much fill it up, where as a ship has lots of room for other things.

Perhaps we get in a canoe and a car because we step into them from above.  It implies concealment within something, to be surrounded.   For example, If mom tells us to go to bed and we get ‘on our bed’ we’ll likely still get in trouble when she comes down the hall and sees us sitting or even laying on our bed.  We’re not actually ‘in bed’ until we are under the covers.  

By this logic, we get on a bus, a plane or a ship because we have to climb up onto them.  In the case of the ship, we walk up a gangplank, for a plane we use the terminal ramp, and for a bus, we climb up stairs.

More examples:  Huckleberry fin and Jim got on a raft and floated down the Mississippi River.  The raft was small, but it had no sides, and there was nothing to get ‘into,’ (except for the lean-to built on the raft, which is only part of the raft and not the raft itself.)