My column of two weeks ago endorsing the graceful use of terminal prepositions raised a storm of protests. This letter is one of many:
Sorry Richard! I taught English for 34 years and my mother and grandmother also did the same. It is NOT proper English to place prepositions at the end of a sentence. It NEVER has been and NEVER will be proper. Next you will be saying that the use of “u” for “you” is fine because slang spelling in texting has changed the use for the better. Some writers take liberty with spelling and word context, but that does not make it proper.
— Richard Conklin, Escondido
The rule banishing terminal prepositions from educated discourse was invented by the late-17th century British critic and poet John Dryden, who reasoned that preposito in Latin means something that “comes before” and that prepositions in Latin never appear at the end of a sentence. Dryden even went so far as to re-edit his own works in order to remove the offending construction.
Unfortunately, Dryden neglected to consider two crucial points. First, the rules of Latin don’t always apply to English. There exist vast differences between the two languages in their manner of connecting verbs and prepositions. Latin is a language of cases, English a language of word order. In Latin, it is physically impossible for a preposition to appear at the end of a sentence. Second, the greatest writers in English, before and after the time of Dryden, have freely ended sentences with prepositions. Why? Because the construction is a natural and graceful part of our English idiom. Here are a few examples from the masters:
• We are such stuff/As dreams are made on. — William Shakespeare
• Houses are built to live in, not to look on. — Francis Bacon
• What a fine conformity would it starch us all into. — John Milton
• … soil good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in. — James Russell Lowell
• All words are pegs to hang ideas on. — Henry Ward Beecher
The final preposition is one of the glories of the English language. If we shackle its idioms and muffle its music with false rules, we diminish the power of our language. If we rewrite the quotations above to conform to Dryden’s edict, the natural beauty of our prose and verse is diminished.
“Fly to others of whom we know not”; “All words are pegs upon which to hang ideas” — now the statements are artificial — people simply don’t talk like that — and, in most cases, wordier.
The most widely circulated tale of the terminal preposition involves Sir Winston Churchill, one of the greatest of all English prose stylists. As the story goes, an officious editor had the audacity to “correct” a proof of Churchill’s memoirs by revising a sentence that ended with the outlawed preposition. Sir Winston hurled back at the editor a memorable rebuttal: “This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!”
The Churchill quip is one of many terminal preposition jokes, an indication of the creakiness of the so-called rule. Here are two more of my favorites:
For the punster there’s the setup joke about the prisoner who asks a female guard to marry him on the condition that she help him escape. This is a man attempting to use a proposition to end a sentence with.
Then there’s the one about the little boy who has just gone to bed when his father comes into the room carrying a book about Australia. Surprised, the boy asks: “What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of from about Down Under up for?”
I challenge you anti-terminal prepositionists out there to provide citations from any reputable grammar book that supports your position.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com