Well, as far as that argument goes, I was taught that a lot of things were wrong which, in fact weren't. The sources I checked were Fowler's, Strunk, Baker, Oxford University Press, the American Heritage Book of English Usage, the Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, the Purdue online writing lab and the Chicago Manual of Style. Since those are the sources I tend to refer to time and again for answers to those pesky little grammatical questions that pop up from time to time, I've decided to go with them.
Hee! Fowler (2nd edition, 1965) on this very subject:
"It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late. . . . The fact is that. . . . even now immense pains are sometimes expended in changing spontaneous into artificial English. . . . 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. . . . In avoiding the forbidden order, unskillful handlers of words often fall into real blunders. . . ." (473-474)
He goes on: "the 'preposition' is in fact [often] the adverbial particle of a phrasal verb, [and] no choice is open to us; it cannot be wrested from its partner" (475)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-06 09:52 pm (UTC)Hee! Fowler (2nd edition, 1965) on this very subject:
"It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late. . . . The fact is that. . . . even now immense pains are sometimes expended in changing spontaneous into artificial English. . . . 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. . . .
In avoiding the forbidden order, unskillful handlers of words often fall into real blunders. . . ." (473-474)
He goes on: "the 'preposition' is in fact [often] the adverbial particle of a phrasal verb, [and] no choice is open to us; it cannot be wrested from its partner" (475)
And now I'll stop being obnoxious, I promise. :)