I recently went off in someone's comments about this subject, only because two friends of mine and I were having this very conversation the other night.
Every day, I am more deeply disturbed by the malignant influence high school English teachers, as well as the core curricula (skewed in an effort to meet predetermined scores on standardized tests), have on their students.
From now on, ending a sentence
with a preposition is something
up with which I will not put.
— Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
with a preposition is something
up with which I will not put.
— Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
No doubt you have been taught that ending your sentences in a preposition is one of the seven deadly sins of the English Language that will send you to Grammatical Hell. Not so! There is nothing incomplete or unclear about these sentences (in and of themselves, as there are many other ways to slaughter syntax), yet we were taught not only to avoid them, but to work around them in such preposterous ways, that too often, the sentences make less sense after the revision. For the sake of "formal" writing, the reader is subjected to wordy and pretentious dribble. It is here where the author has committed the greatest crime in literature and all writing: he has at best, distracted, and at worst, lost, the reader.
Fortunately, whatever body of English gods exist in America has apparently decided that ending a sentence in a preposition is now okay. Now if we could just get the teachers and professors to leave the word said alone, we'll be on the right course to making communication the purpose of language again.
current mood:
too busy to give
a proper blog entry
a proper blog entry
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