Let’s take a moment to debunk a widely held superstition about good usage. (By the way, debunk, pronounced di-BUHNGK, means to expose as false, deceitful, or exaggerated, to prove that something is bunkum [BUHNGK-um], foolish and insincere.)
Do you remember the old rule, “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”? Well, it’s too bad it was ever taught, for it is wrong, wrong, wrong. If you think I’m cracked, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, then I dare you to say, “You don’t know about what you’re talking.”
Some time ago, while visiting relatives, I met a woman who was studying to be a teacher. She had just received a misguided lecture on the evils of ending a sentence with a preposition. “How long are you staying for?” she asked me. Then, embarrassed, she changed that perfectly natural sentence to “For how long are you staying?”—which made her sound like Eliza Doolittle practicing for her next pinky-in-the-air tea party.
“For years Miss Thistlebottom has been teaching her bright-eyed brats that no writer would end a sentence with a preposition,” says Theodore M. Bernstein in The Careful Writer (1965), a book that anyone who puts words on paper should keep close at hand. “The truth,” Bernstein asserts, “is that no good writer would follow Miss Thistlebottom’s rule, although he might occasionally examine it to see if there was any merit in it.”
Bernstein was assistant managing editor of The New York Times, an associate professor in Columbia University’s School of Journalism, and a respected arbiter on English usage. Bernstein maintains that sentences that end with prepositions are “idiomatic and have been constructed that way from Shakespeare’s ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on’ to today’s ‘Music to read by.’ They are a natural manner of expression. Examine a handful: ‘It’s nothing to sneeze at’; ‘Something to guard against’; ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through’; ‘He is a man who can be counted on’; ‘I’m not sure what the cake was made of.’ Surely there is nothing amiss with these idiomatic constructions. Woe to Miss Thistlebottom if she tries to ‘correct’ them. She won’t have a leg on which to stand.”
Back in 1926, the legendary English grammarian H. W. Fowler, in his classic guide Modern English Usage, called the rule about prepositions “a cherished superstition.” According to Fowler, “Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are ‘inelegant’ are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards.
“The legitimacy of the prepositional ending in literary English must be uncompromisingly maintained,” says Fowler. “In respect of elegance or inelegance, every example must be judged not by any arbitrary rule, but on its own merits, according to the impression it makes on the feeling of educated English readers.”
Hundreds of great writers from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton to Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Toni Morrison all have written intelligible, graceful, idiomatic sentences that ended with a preposition. To say those writers were wrong is like saying everyone in baseball’s Hall of Fame didn’t know a thing about how to play the game. The best contemporary writers also do not hesitate to let a preposition end a sentence when it pleases the ear, and they avoid doing so when it does not.
So the next time some nitpicking Miss Thistlebottom says you mustn’t end a sentence with a preposition, try this retort: “You, dear sir or madam, may twist your syntax into knots if you like, but please refrain from telling the rest of us what to end our sentences with.”
And that, as the saying goes, is what it all boils down to.
