Prepositions? Put 'em Where You Want

It's a common enough experience for most adults, I think, to suddenly think of something we learned back in school, something we've always just assumed was true, and suddenly say, “Well, wait. Is that really right?”

When it comes to grammar, I find that a lot of folks have half-remembered rules rattling around upstairs that they'd be better off without. “Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” is one. People tell me all the time that their grade school teachers taught them that, but I don't know where it comes from. Really, it's OK to begin a sentence with a conjunction (and, or, but, so, yet, for, nor). And I can prove it.

Here's another: Never use a preposition to end a sentence. I remember the great relief I felt when Bill Robinson, the professor of my graduate level grammar class at SF State (I was learning to teach English comp) informed us that this rule was no longer considered anything worth worrying about. So now I pass this information on to you. It is not necessary to write, “That is the proposal about which we were talking,” even in the most formal business writing. It is fine to write, “That is the proposal we were talking about.”

You'll still get arguments about this, though, and sometimes quite vigorous ones. So instead of just urging you to take my word for it, let me hand you some ammunition.

The Authorities Speak

Bryan A. Garner, in his A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 1998), says, “The spurious rule about not ending sentences with propositions is a remnant of Latin grammar, in which a preposition was the one word that a writer could not end a sentence with [ha!]. But Latin grammar should never straitjacket English grammar. If the superstition is a rule at all, it is a rule of rhetoric and not of grammar, the idea being to end sentences with strong words that drive a point home. that principle is sound, of course, but not to the extent of meriting lockstep adherence.”

The famous [trust me] grammarian H.W. Fowler (as quoted by Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage: A Guide to English [W.W. Norton & Co., 1973, revised 1997]) also called the ban against final prepositions a “superstition.” Fowler added that the final preposition was “. . . a valuable idiomatic resource which has been freely used by all our greatest writers, except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards.” He concluded, “The legitimacy of the prepositional ending in literary English must be uncompromisingly maintained.”

The Origins of Misguided Convention

So where did this “spurious rule,” this “superstition,” come from? Patricia T. O'Conner, the author of Woe is I, a wonderful book on grammar, provided a clear explanation in a 1998 New York Times essay entitled “It's Just Fine to Boldly Go” (November 1, 1998). She was talking about split infinitives (they're OK, too, by the way), another rule from Latin superimposed onto English. O'Conner lays the mischief at the feet of the Dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, who, in 1864, “published a widely popular grammar book called A Plea for the Queen's English. Alford, a classics scholar . . . sought to civilize the English of Shakespeare and Milton by imposing on it the rules of Latin grammar. . . . As early as 1868, grammarians were challenging Alford's edict, arguing that one can't graft Latin sentence structure onto English, a language that's essentially Germanic. But the damage had been done. The ban on splitting infinitives was firmly planted in the popular imagination. So were other leftover Latinisms, including the ban against ending sentences with prepositions.”

So there you have it. The rule forbidding prepositions at the end of sentences isn't a rule of English at all. It is some serious misinformation, propagated by a know-it-all pendant, that, once spread, has somehow refused to die, like some tough grammatical weed.

Winston Churchill (as quoted by Garner), stated the matter best, and most famously, when, criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition, he replied, “That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”

I hope that helps. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions on this subject.

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