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"What are you doing?"
"I told you, I'm headed to gym."

I read the above in a novel today. "I'm headed to gym" seems wrong to me because [please insert reason here]. Am I right?

Marthaª
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Anders Lind
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  • Voting to close as Not Constructive. The low level of pre-existing linguistic competence, and the obvious lack of care in presenting the question and ensuring some degree of consistency, convince me this isn't worth answering. – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '12 at 04:40
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    What about this sentence seems incorrect to you, @Anders? I ask because what looks totally wrong to me is using "gym" without an article, but you've tagged your question [past-tense]. Is this an exact quote from the novel? – Marthaª Mar 16 '12 at 04:46
  • @Marthaª: Okay, you've salvaged the poor presentation of the question, and Barrie has peered through the murk to identify the real issue involved, so I'll vote to reopen. If it actually gets reopened, I might vote that it's a dup of Is there a reason the British omit the article when they “go to hospital”?, but I certainly can't say it's "Not Constructive" in its present form. – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '12 at 14:52

2 Answers2

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The question is not so much whether it’s ‘correct grammar’, as whether anyone actually says it. There are a number of nouns describing places that can be used in objective position without an article. In the UK, at least, you will hear things like ‘I have to go to hospital’, ‘Is he going to school yet?’ ‘When is she going to university?’ ‘I went to church today’. A gym seems to be a different sort of place, a mere building rather than a respected institution, and it seems to be that that makes the difference, so you don’t normally hear ‘I’m going to gym’. However, you might occasionally hear ‘We had gym at school today’, meaning the speaker had a lesson in physical education, or ‘I’ve got gym now’, meaning the speaker is scheduled to take some form of indoor exercise.

Barrie England
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  • Actually, I don't see any logical reason why we couldn't say going to gym on the same lines as going to school, but the fact remains that we don't say it. I wonder why. Ah well, language doesn't have to be logical. – TRiG Mar 29 '12 at 22:37
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"I am heading to a store/my school/the gymnasium" is correct. English requires an article or possessive for most object nouns.

Richard Haven
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