I'm a Spanish native speaker. I'm learning English and I want to know the difference between using "in the way" and "on the way".
I want to know the real meaning of both phrases.
PS: Sorry for my bad English.
Learn English – What’s the difference between using “in the way” and “on the way”
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I feel like the word pail almost always describes a metallic object, shaped in a near-cylindrical fashion. Sometimes a pail can be wooden, but rarely. Buckets can be made of any old material, especially plastic, and can be shaped more strangely than pails.
In addition, bucket has some interesting and amusing uses in slang:
In its plural form, it can be an expression of unalloyed happiness. It comes from the slang term from having just scored a field goal in basketball. For example, if you had just won something unexpected in the mail, you might say "Buckets!" to celebrate it, just as you might having scored playing basketball.
It can describe a particularly decrepit vehicle, a hoop-ti; most often applied to vans.
It's an urban slang term for urban-style hats, typically wide-brim and loose fitting.
It's an urban slang term for expensive rims on a car. As so memorably used by the rapper Yung Joc, "...ride around slow so you can see the buckets on my feet [tires]..."
Pail, sad to say, is utterly lacking in this regard.
EDIT: Taking a look through Google's N-Gram viewer, it's not hard to see why:
This comparison of bucket and pail from 1800 till today shows the latter's usage diverging noticeably from the former's around the era of 1940–1960, to becoming a much less popular a synonym for the former nowadays. The chart makes a lot of sense to me, at least superficially; the 1950s–1960s was an era where college attendance and job mobility were first greatly expanded and democratized, and where a lot of young adults who might have grown up to work on the family farm in older times instead found white-collar, professional work. As pail in literature is strongly associated in my mind with farming contexts, it makes sense to me that authors would have limited their use of pail in that era given its more limited relevance towards their target audience. If a word doesn't quite have a "regular" currency, obviously there will be fewer opportunities for it to make its way into slang usage.
Close and near can be used as adjectives, and in many cases they are the same when talking about physical distances.
The train station is close.
The train station is near.
They are not the same when talking about more abstract concepts, like relationships.
My mother is close [she is 3 feet away].
My mother and I are very close [we have a strong family bond].
My mother is near [she is 3 feet away].
My mother and I are very near [we are 3 feet apart].
Only near can be used as a preposition without the word to.
*We are close the train station.
We are close to the train station [correct: close to is the proposition].
We are near the train station [correct: near is the preposition].
When you convert to adverb form, they are not interchangeable at all. In this case, closely implies "at a small distance", while nearly implies "almost but not quite"
*We are nearly following the news.
We are closely following the news.*I closely hurt myself.
I nearly hurt myself.
* incorrect usage
Best Answer
"In the way" means that something is an obstacle. For example, "I can't move my car because that truck is in the way".
"On the way" means that something, or someone, is in the process of reaching a goal, or a destination. For example, "I called her to let her know I was on my way to Madrid". Another: "After the initial meeting, I told the boss that we are on the way to meeting the first deadline".