In The Elephants of Style, author Bill Walsh reports that when he was five years old he enjoyed playing with alternate spellings of words. When I was five years old, I enjoyed playing in mud.
Word expert and “On Language” guest columnist Erin McKean proudly pronounced in one column, “I’ve wanted to be a lexicographer since I was eight.” When I was eight, I wanted to be Donny Osmond’s wife.
Punctuation stickler Lynne Truss looks back ruefully on age fourteen as a time when she tried to use big words to humiliate a pen pal. I look back ruefully on age fourteen as a time when I learned how to French inhale.
When it comes to troubled youth, the writing is always on the wall. And if someone doesn’t recognize the signs and intervene, a disturbed kid has a lifetime of problems to look forward to. I’m talking about serious problems that, unlike dirty fingernails, smoking, and impure thoughts about Mormons, are unlikely to be corrected later in life.
Though some desperately uncool little word nerds manage to avoid the evil thrills of humiliating others through language, far too many find themselves caught in a vicious cycle of smug superiority and wedgies. Tragically, these youths blossom into adults whose sole pleasure in life comes from repeating clever but snooty lines such as Winston Churchill’s defiant quip about the so-called rule that one should not end a sentence with a preposition: “That is the type of pedantry up with which I shall not put.”
In some highly scientific research that consisted of me scratching my head and saying, “Gee, it sure seems like I’ve heard that a lot before,” I have deduced that this Churchill quote is the single greatest thing ever to happen to meaniekind. Grammar snobs love it more than they love catching typos in the New Yorker. It’s their favorite thing in the world, my science has shown.
Similarly scientific probability models have concluded that Churchill’s highbrow tone and use of the word “pedantry” are the only reasons that meanies embrace loosening this rigid language “rule.” Had Churchill expressed the same sentiment with words commonly used by people named Skeeter, the meanies would still demand that we say things like, “In whose oven are you going to bake that mud pie?” But today, even these nicotine- and Donny Osmond–deprived meanies concede it’s okay to put the preposition “in” at the end: “Whose oven are you going bake that mud pie in?”
A quick refresher: Prepositions are little words like “about,” “as,” “at,” “by,” “for,” “from,” “in,” “of,” “on,” “since,” “through,” “to,” “toward,” “until,” “with,” “without,” etcetera—words that juxtapose certain actions or ideas with others. Some words are both prepositions and other parts of speech, such as “up.” In “Put the book up on the shelf,” “up” is a preposition. In “The baby can sit up,” it’s an adjective. If you need to distinguish between the two, just note that a preposition always takes an object: In the above example, “on the shelf” is the object of “up.”
When it comes to putting prepositions at the end of sentences, the Chicago Manual of Style says, “The traditional caveat of yesteryear against ending sentences with prepositions is, for most writers, an unnecessary and pedantic restriction.” (See, I told you they love words like “pedantry.”)
The Elements of Style notes that, once upon a time, students were told not to end sentences with prepositions but that this “rigid decree” has loosened up over time. “Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end,” Strunk and White write, “sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else. ‘A claw hammer, not an ax, was the tool he murdered her with’ ”—a not-so-random example that would one day prove pivotal in convicting Mr. Strunk in a trial that inspired the Sherlock Holmes story “The Case of the Claw-Hammering, Homicidal Grammarian Who Eschewed the Ax.”
Garner’s Modern American Usage traces the nonrule back to its roots: “The spurious rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a remnant of Latin grammar, in which a preposition was the one word that a writer could not end a sentence with.”
Sassy how he ends that sentence with the preposition “with,” huh?
Most people don’t know that it’s okay to end sentences with prepositions. The majority are haunted by vague memories of some teacher or other meanie harrumphing at a poor slob who said, “Who are you going to the movies with?” And the masses’ insecurities are a boon to the meanies. As is their nature, grammar snobs are stuck in a cycle of forever salving old social hurts by grabbing every opportunity to feel superior, using others’ weaknesses to their own advantage.
The snobs have even managed to twist the rules to give themselves free rein to break them while still insulting others who break them. For example, Strunk and White note, “Only the writer whose ear is reliable is in a position to use bad grammar deliberately.”
And who, you might ask, gets to select the members of this secret Reliable Ear Society? Strunk and White don’t say exactly, but they seem to think that reading their book will better your odds of being one of the chosen few.
Yes, obviously we’re dealing with people still stinging from the humiliations of youth and getting their revenge on the cool cliques that rejected them by excluding pretty much the whole world from the Reliable Ear Society. Don’t let them push you around. Your ear is better than they want you to know. End a sentence with a preposition anytime it sounds—to you—like the best alternative.