Whence, where, whither

Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomer) wrote a post called Whence NASA?. It's a good post, springboarding from an article on the NASA site comparing "1968 Science Fiction" and "Today's Reality". Phil thinks they're overselling it. His post ends:

But trying to compare where we are now to where visionary movies like "2001" were hoping we would be simply hammers home the cold hard fact that we’ve spent the past 45 years since Apollo circling the Earth. There are no Moon bases, no regular Shuttle flights to orbit, no rotating space habitats.

It’s politics, I know that. But politics is about choices, and we’ve chosen poorly. We need politicians who will choose wisely, who can see past their own term, past their own partisan desires, past the limits of gravity and atmosphere and current technology, and willing to do what we need to do, what we must do: go into space, do it the right way, the sustainable way, and explore it.

Our future is out there, just as our past predicted. We’ve stepped away from the right path, but that path is still there. We simply have to choose to step back on it.

At this moment he's got 59 responses. Only one asked why he called it "whence NASA?" instead of "whither". Charlie's right: given the contents of Phil's post, "whence" is the wrong word.

It's probably because this is an odd word - we don't use either "whence" or "whither" any more, unless we're quoting (or ripping off a quote). We don't use any of the directional adverbs any more, in fact. English used to - as many European language still do - have a set of three for "here, there, where"- one meaning "to", one "from", and one "at". In fact, this is mostly likely why some dialects of English now say "where at", to the great annoyance of many whose dialects don't. Though, if you think about it, if you can use "where" in cases like

"He's going to London next week."
"Where???"
"Oh, not England, just Kentucky."

then it's hard to argue that "where" just means the stative so the "at" isn't necessary. But I digress. (Again.)

At any rate, "whither, thither, hither" all meant "motion towards" - to where, to there, to here. On the other hand, "whence, thence, hence" all meant "motion away from" - from where, from there, from here. As I said, many European languages still maintain these: German still has the full set (hierher, hier, hierhin; daher, da, dahin; woher, wo, wohin) and so does Russian (сюда, здесь, отсюда; туда, там, оттуда; куда, где, откуда [syuda, zdes, otsyuda; tuda, tam, ottuda; kuda, gde, otkuda]) for hither, here, hence; thither, there, thence; whither, where, whence). Modern English gets by with adverbs (or prepositions, whichever you prefer to call them).

So here Phil's asking "Where is NASA coming from?" and clearly, by his article, he means to be asking "Where is NASA going to?" Note, by the way, that "Whither NASA?" not only doesn't need a preposition (or adverb), it doesn't need the verb either! How cool is that? Why did we stop using those words? (Again, I digress.)

We did stop using them. Oh, they hang around in fossilized phrases such as "hither, thither, and yon", or the vampish "come-hither look". "Whither goest thou?" - the translation of quo vadis - sounds quaint and even silly nowadays. Even "Whither go you?" and "whither are you going?" don't really work. It has to be "where are you going?" But if you have a reason to use one of these words, try to get the right one! "To" and "from" aren't interchangeable. Neither are the "-ence" and "-ither" words.