File under “Up or Shut Up, Put (Part II)”: Some people can’t take a joke.
We’ve all heard the quote, misattributed to Winston Churchill, made in defiance of the “rule” proscribing prepositions, sentences ending in (especially if you just read the entry immediately preceding this one). For the random browsers, that quote goes something along the lines of “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I shall not put.” People jumbling that line in so many ways led to the Churchill Preposition Witticism Generator in the entry immediately preceeding this one. And in fact people jumble it so completely that some end up turning it into its opposite. On a website listing famous quotes, I found: “Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” This version supports the “arrant pedantry” that the non-Churchill was actually railing against. The strange negation is so common that I also found “From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” I didn’t have to look far. It was on the same page as the previously quoted version.
But that’s OK. Even when people get the quote right, it’s a lie. Or at least it’s not being true to itself. If the apocryphal jibe were to be written with “arrant pedantry,” it would read, simply and unpretentiously, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense I shall not put up with.” Not very quotable, is it?
“This is the sort of bloody nonsense I shall not put up with” doesn’t end with a preposition. With is part of the verb phrase “to put up with,” synonymous with the infinitive verb to tolerate. To clarify, let’s examine the sentence, “You put up with me.” If you and I were storing Christmas ornaments on the top shelf, you would be putting
(the ornaments) up with (as in “along with”) me, and in this case with would be a preposition. But when you the reader put up with me, you are tolerating me, and I am thanking you profusely and moving gently on to the next topic so I don’t further test your tolerance with interminable discussion of this topic.