For some reason Google decided to put an ad for a grammar book on top of an email I was reading (perhaps they're trying to tell me something about my writing?) The book was titled "Woe is I" and being somewhat intrigued I clicked on it. And lo! I was rewarded with this little jewel of a page, debunking some common grammar myths. Here's one:
TOMBSTONE: It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition.
R.I.P.
We can blame an 18th-century English clergyman named Robert Lowth for
this one. He wrote the first grammar book saying a preposition (a
positioning word, like at, by, for, into, off, on, out, over, to, under, up, with)
shouldn't go at the end of a sentence. This idea caught on, even though
great literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton is bristling
with sentences ending with prepositions. Nobody knows just why the
notion stuck—possibly because it's closer to Latin grammar, or
perhaps because the word "preposition" means "position before," which
seemed to mean that a preposition can't come last.
At any rate, this is a rule that modern grammarians have long tried to get us out from under.
TOMBSTONE: It's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition.R.I.P.
We can blame an 18th-century English clergyman named Robert Lowth for
this one. He wrote the first grammar book saying a preposition (a
positioning word, like at, by, for, into, off, on, out, over, to, under, up, with)
shouldn't go at the end of a sentence. This idea caught on, even though
great literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton is bristling
with sentences ending with prepositions. Nobody knows just why the
notion stuck—possibly because it's closer to Latin grammar, or
perhaps because the word "preposition" means "position before," which
seemed to mean that a preposition can't come last.
At any rate, this is a rule that modern grammarians have long tried to get us out from under.
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