Why you CAN end your sentences with a preposition
Originally posted: 2/15/2022
Send this to stick-in-the-mud grammar teachers 🤷♀️🤘
Transcription:
Don't end your sentence with a preposition is a completely fake grammar rule.
Two stories. First, Winston Churchill is apocryphally said to have mocked this rule with the wonderfully awkward sentence, "This is the sort of thing up with which I will not put." Point being, the natural way to say that same sentence ends with a preposition. "This is the sort of thing I won't put up with." You're going to sound like a weirdo if you say it correctly. So, why do people want to.
Second story. In 1672, author John Dryden criticized author Ben Johnson for ending his sentences in prepositions, calling it a common fault with him. This is because Dryden wanted English grammar to parallel Latin grammar. But in Latin, sentences can't end with prepositions. So, the English Latin comparison is spurious. Word of the day alert. Spurious is a fancy way to say bogus. Then like a bad meme, this complaint proliferated through the culture, giving the kind of people who write letters to the editor, even more to complain about, but it's not real. It's just a 350-year-old pet peeve.
Linguists and usage guides all agree that the terminal preposition is just fine. So, when someone says, "Don't end a sentence with a preposition," you can tell them what to shove it up. See what I did there? Hey, if you like being told that the way you speak English is perfectly fine, come along. I got more.
#grammar #descriptivist #linguistics #language #remake