English grammar, like English history, is scattered with myths, the origins of which we can only guess at. One, as we have seen, is that infinitives must not be split. Perhaps times are changing for that one: there seems now to be a tendency to boldly split infinitives that have never been split before.
Another is that a sentence should not end with a preposition. This idea has three remarkable features. First, the ardour with which it is embraced has built progressively over the centuries, while many other aspects of proper grammar have fallen into disuse. Second, even into the twenty-first century it continues to be repeated and insisted on. And third, the desperate need to avoid a terminal preposition drives otherwise rational people into grammatical contortions of the most grotesque sort.
The word preposition comes from the Latin praepositionem which is self-explanatory: it seems to insist that the thing be put before the noun or pronoun it governs. In the Oxford Companion to English, Tom McArthur explains that, because of the original meaning of preposition, ‘the classical prescriptive rule emerged for standard English that sentences should not end with a preposition.’ Nevertheless, in early times of innocence, even writers of the first rank ended sentences with prepositions, leaving the relative far behind. Shakespeare was a frequent offender:
Now all the blessings Of a glad father, compasse thee about.
(The Tempest, Act V: i)
The day is broke, be wary, looke about. (Romeo and Juliet, Act III: v)
And let me speake to th’ yet unknowing world How these things came about. (Hamlet, Act V: ii)
Indeede I am in the waste two yards about. (Merry Wives of Windsor, Act I: ii)
We have some secrets to confer about. (Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act III: ii)
He was not alone:
A great altar to see to. (Bible, Joshua 22:10)
They are the fittest timber to make great politiques of. (Bacon, Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature)
Let us descend and see if we can meet with more honor and honesty in the next world we shall touch upon. (Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave)
The subject was too delicate to question Johnson upon.
(Boswell, Life of Dr Johnson)
‘Yes,’ said the good lady, who now knew what ground we were upon. (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre)
When the Fowler brothers published The King’s English in 1906, they inadvertently gave offence with its opening sentence. Longer than is now fashionable, other than in the law reports, it occupies an entire paragraph. It reads:
The compilers of this book would be wanting in courtesy if they did not expressly say what might otherwise be safely left to the reader’s discernment: the frequent appearances in it of any author’s or newspaper’s name does not mean that that author or newspaper offends more often than others against rules of grammar or style; it merely shows that they have been among the necessarily limited number chosen to collect instances from.
A reviewer dismissed the book out of hand on account of that sentence. But the Fowler brothers had not intended to be provocative. The matter was of no account to them: The King’s English contains no discussion of terminal prepositions. As H.W. Fowler remarked in a note to the 1930 edition: ‘It had not occurred to us to examine seriously the validity of what, superstition or no, is a widespread belief.’
The sentence irritated a lot of people who, as irritated people tend to do, wrote corrective letters. H.W. Fowler got his quiet revenge in Modern English Usage (1927), with an entry under the topic: ‘Preposition at End’. Having ignored the subject in 1906, Fowler amasses, in just two pages, overwhelming evidence to demonstrate that the anxiety which afflicts so many English speakers is nothing but a ‘cherished superstition’. He marshals dozens of examples of final prepositions in work by the great writers of English. Burchfield, in his third edition of Modern English Usage, describes the phenomenon as ‘one of the most persistent myths about prepositions’.
Fowler’s research suggests that the original culprit was Dryden, who ‘went through all his prefaces contriving away all the final prepositions he had been guilty of in his first editions’. (It is lucky for us all that Dryden wrote after Shakespeare, or we might have lost the reassurance Shakespeare offers by his frequent excursions into the forbidden territory.) Dryden’s zeal left its mark on generations of school children. Even now, when most people are taught very little grammar, most seem to know the ‘rule’ about final prepositions. The matter is made the more absurd (and difficult) because some words are both prepositions and adverbs, in which case the dictates of usage and folklore are different according to the role played. Examples of prepositions which can also be adverbs are: about, beside, beyond, forth, inward, midway, near, off, round, round about, and since.
Despite the tenacity of the superstition, it remains true that style is the determining consideration. Some sentences would be absurd with the preposition at the end; others may be constructed with the preposition at the end or not, according to taste; others again will be unreasonably distorted if the imagined rule is allowed to intimidate good sense.
In the following examples, the alternatives do not work, even as a joke:
She went into the church.
The church is what she went into.
I look forward to meeting you.
Meeting you is what I look forward to.
In the following, the choice is one of taste: more formal or less?
I wanted a seat from which I could see the game.
I wanted a seat I could see the game from.
For which firm do you work?
Which firm do you work for?
In some sentences, only recasting will remove the supposed problem:
The bed had not been slept in.
No one had slept in the bed.
What did you do that for?
Why did you do that?
At the end of his entry about final prepositions, Fowler offers the following advice:
Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made; if the abnormal, or at least unorthodox, final preposition that has naturally presented itself sounds comfortable, keep it; if it does not sound comfortable, still keep it if it has compensating vigour, or when among awkward possibilities it is the least awkward.
It was some years later that a departmental memo, which had gone to extreme lengths to avoid a final preposition, drove Churchill to note in the margin: ‘This is the sort of English up with which I will not put’. It is a sentiment most would agree with.
The durable myth that educated people should not end a sentence with a preposition was neatly exploited by a Chicago reporter in the aftermath of the Loeb-Leopold trial (1924). After 12 years in prison, Dickie Loeb was stabbed to death by another prisoner, James Day. Day was charged with his murder. His defence was that Loeb had made a homosexual advance, and that he was defending himself. With more wit than taste, the journalist wrote: ‘Richard Loeb, despite his erudition, ended his sentence with a proposition.’