As I approach this post, I kind of feel like a first-timer at AA. I can see myself entering the room, grimacing at the truly atrocious green painted walls, and eyeing a circle of chairs populated by dejected persons such as myself. I awkwardly take a seat on a dilapidated, white chair and make sure not to make premature eye contact with anyone. Before I know it, the front door gently opens to reveal a woman, probably in her fifties, clipboard in hand. She issues a friendly greeting to us all, and the meeting begins. Each takes their turn introducing themselves and our common malady. Much too soon, it's my turn. I stand up, knees shaking gently, and bashfully say...
"My name is Kevin Neff, and I keep correcting the grammar of others."
Loyal readers and others, I am afraid I have a problem... a problem with sentences ending in prepositions. You see, recently I never realized that such was grammatically incorrect. I had heard once from a Latino professor of English that they had been taught the phrase, "Where are you from?" wasn't right. I scoffed at this. After all, I was the one who had been speaking English my entire life, not this guy! Turns out the son of a gun was right after all. Having recently discovered my folly, it seemed as though all of a sudden I could no longer end my own sentences in words like "from", "to", "for", "at", etc. Then, like a malignant cancer, it spread to the point where I found myself auto-correcting the sentences of others. It started in my head. Then I came to say it out loud. You may ask, "So what?" I'll tell you! First you start correcting your own sentences, then the sentences of others, and then.... this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vf8N6GpdM
Next time I'll talk about Christmas. I promise you.
"We have nothing to fight them with! Or, with which to fight them-- but this is no time for grammar!!" - Giroro
ReplyDeleteA few random opinions on the whole ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition thing:
ReplyDelete"I have no idea where this rule came from. What I do know is that many people, in an effort to keep from ticking off the Grammar Police, start twisting their sentences around so as not to end them with prepositions. Unfortunately, more often than not, the new syntax is terribly awkward and painful to read. Take the first sentence of this section, for example. “From where this rule came” sounds like something Yoda would say, not me. A big part of writing is showing your personality through words. How can you do that when you’re twisting your phrases to suit some archaic rule?"
"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. But Latin grammar should never straightjacket English grammar. If this 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 or flouting established idiom."
Do you really want to be so "correct" as to complain, "That is the sort of thing up with which I will not put!"