Ending a sentence on a preposition
Image: Cecil Beaton (public domain)
An ancient piece of nursery grammar states that one should never end a sentence on a preposition.
It’s called a PREposition after all. And if it’s ‘pre’ (or ‘before’) then it should have something after it, shouldn’t it?
Well, shouldn’t it?
This rule can be traced back to a problem that we’ll come across again in these newsletters: the desire of English grammarians to apply the (admittedly very elegant) template of Latin grammar onto messy old English, with its mongrel Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Norman roots and influences.
The grammatical rule is a bit of a cover for the deeper reason: seeking to forbid utterances that sounded, as they used to say in the olden days, ‘coarse’ or ‘common’. So, instead of a straightforward question such as: ‘Who are you going to the pub with?’ the uncouth speaker would be corrected thus: ‘With whom are you going to the pub?’
Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
Sir Winston Churchill – a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, by the way – supposedly knocked this grammatical prescription into a cocked hat with his rejoinder to an overzealous editor who had clumsily corrected a sentence of Churchill’s that ended on a preposition: ‘This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.’
But the rule can be helpful when faced with a car crash of a sentence such as this, from a father telling his son to fetch a favourite bedtime story: ‘Go and get the book you want to be read to out of.’ Sometimes it’s just better to rewrite (and rethink) the whole thing.
The benefit of most grammatical rules is in getting us to slow down and think about what we are actually trying to say to our audience and how best that message might be conveyed.
Or how it might be conveyed best.
