File under “Prepositions, with Which to Not End a Sen-tence With”: We answer the question posed in this section’s introduction.
So, once more, what’s that all about?
It’s about the fact that persnickitors are shuddering at the sentence directly above, the sentence that used the word about, a preposition, to end the sentence with. (And they’re shuddering at the preposition with in the previous sentence, too.) When Bishop Robert Lowth published 1762’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (we’d all be better off had it been even shorter), he based several of his principles on a language of the classics, the revered Latin. If a rule applies to Latin, was his thinking, it must be good. With reverence to the classical language, therefore, I should have written not “What’s that all about?” but instead “About which is that all?” (which is arguably a Latin sentence, because it sure isn’t English—not natural English, anyway, and certainly not communicative English.)
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Bill Brohaugh
The rule may have lingered in an effort to guard against weak line endings in poetry. For example, when I wrote above “to end the sentence with,” the problem was not the position of the preposition, but its very existence. Just cut it for concision, and the sentence makes perfect sense. On the other hand, the poets worried about weak line endings never imagined the Beatles unweakly belting out “Work it on out!” in “Twist and Shout.” ’Nuff said.
So, if someone fusses at you for ending a sentence with a preposition (or, as Master Yoda would say, “for sentence ending preposition with”), just reply, “Vos operor non narro Latin” (“You do not speak Latin”). Or better yet, “Quisnam blandior?” (“Who cares?”)