The postponed preposition

Mrs. James, my uncompromising 7^th grade English teacher, had strong feelings about what she called, with a dismissive sniff, “dangling prepositions.”

“Never, ever, end a sentence with a preposition,” she declared firmly, glaring at us fiercely through her black, cat-eye rimmed glasses. “It’s the sign of a lazy, ignorant writer.”

Her upper lip curled upward in utter contempt as she delivered her decree – as irrefutable and final as Holy Scripture.

Mrs. James was Old School. When it came to grammar, rules were rules. There was no such thing as a difference of opinion. Individual choice didn’t exist. Writerly preferences must bend the knee, always, to The Rules.

She rejected the idea, widely accepted these days, that sentences ending with a preposition are a natural way of talking and – in many cases – a natural way of writing, too.

In fact, avoiding terminal prepositions has never been a rule chiseled in stone, as Mrs. James suggested. Grammarians have wrangled for 300 years about the permissibility of such constructions.

The dispute started, as these things so often do, when playwright-poet John Dryden, a self-declared grammar expert, penned an essay in 1672. He argued that the English used by his generation of writers was superior to that of its predecessors – a group that included the then-not-so-revered Shakespeare.

In that screed, Dryden first declared the evil of sentence-ending prepositions, generously acknowledging he, too, had been guilty of the crime. He then proceeded to revise all his earlier works to eliminate the hell-bound construction, a dramatic move that only served to inject an elevated degree of awkwardness into his writing.

Greater elegance?

It’s unclear how Dryden developed his distaste for what Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage calls the “postponed preposition.”

“But Latin is probably involved,” Merriam-Webster says. “The construction does not exist in Latin, and Dryden claimed to have composed some of his pieces in Latin and then translated them into English – apparently for greater elegance or propriety of expression.”

 Until Dryden poked his nose in, terminal prepositions weren’t an issue, says Merriam-Webster. They were, in fact, a regular feature of Old English.

“No feature of the language can be more firmly rooted than if it survives from Old English,” it notes wryly. (I don’t like the “than if” construction much, but we’ll leave that for another day.)

Winston Churchill, another renowned English writer, is famously associated with the dispute over terminal prepositions.

When an editor clumsily rewrote one of his sentences to eliminate an end preposition, Churchill, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, replied in a note, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.”

 It’s a great story, widely circulated, and has been used by terminal-preposition fans to end arguments for years. Unfortunately, it’s probably a fable. Scholars have failed to link the tale firmly to Churchill.

No less an authority than Henry W. Fowler, whose masterpiece A Dictionary of Modern English Usage was first published in 1926, dismissed the rule against dangling prepositions as a “cherished superstition.”

 And yet the battle still rages.

Writers who use the end preposition often are scolded for their temerity by readers who scrutinize newspapers, magazine articles and books for offenders. Grammatical purists, successors to the formidable Mrs. James, are out there, ever vigilant for miscreants who defile the hallowed tenets they were taught as children.

“Every time we try to dispose of the foolish superstition, we receive a barrage of letters crying, ‘Outrage!’” admits Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage’s William and Mary Morris.

In my own writing, I’ve followed the advice of editors who accept there are no legitimate rules against the use of terminal prepositions, but who caution that such constructions should be used with care.

“Ending a sentence with a preposition … isn’t always such a hot idea, mostly because a sentence should, when it can, aim for a powerful finale and not simply dribble off like an old man’s unhappy micturition,” says editor Benjamin Dreyer in Dreyer’s English.

Theodore Bernstein, late copy chief of The New York Times, agrees.

“It is well to consider that a sentence ending with a preposition is sometimes clumsy, often weak,” he declares in The Careful Writer.

With such warnings in mind, here are four circumstances that cover, in my opinion, most of the times when ending a sentence with a preposition is justified – and may damned well be imperative.

Let’s take them in order of ascending importance (as judged by me).

No. 4 – When the end preposition is part of a phrasal verb. That is, when a preposition and a verb come together to suggest an action different that the one suggested by the verb alone.

For example:

This brand of whiskey is more potent than the one I usually come across.

On such a fine spring day, the tedious Tobias is not the kind of person I wished to run into.

Both come across (the equivalent in this context of taste or buy) and run into (meet or encounter) function as phrasal verbs with very different meaning than the verbs come and run standing alone. Consider the result when you contort the sentence to eliminate the dangling preposition:

This brand of whiskey is more potent than the one across which I usually come. (Good lord!)

On such a fine spring day, the tedious Tobias is not the kind of person into which I wished to run.

No. 3 – When the sentence is an idiomatic expression. If a sentence or phrase ending in a preposition has passed into the common vernacular, messing with it is asking for trouble. Bernstein offers a few examples:

It’s nothing to sneeze at.

Something to guard against.

You don’t know what I’ve been through.

No. 2 – When the verb it precedes is weak and the preposition itself provides the necessary ending punch.

When I started the garden, I didn’t know the work I was getting into.

I ran into a friend the other day, and I asked him, “Alfie, what’s it all about?”

No. 1 – When the sentence just reads better that way. Far and away, this is the strongest reason to use the terminal preposition.

Final sputter

“If by trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, you have seemed to twist words out of their normal order and have created a pompous-sounding locution, abandon the effort,” Bernstein advises.

“Indeed, there is no reason to make the effort at all, unless the sentence sounds like the final sputter the engine has come to. Like that one.”

Dreyer, who earlier advised caution in using postponed prepositions, considers a total ban on the device one of his Big 3 Great Nonrules of the English Language. (The others are Never Begin a Sentence with “And” or “But” and Never Split an Infinitive.)

 “To tie a sentence into a strangling knot to avoid a prepositional conclusion is unhelpful and unnatural, and it’s something no good writer should attempt and no eager reader should have to contend with. If you follow me.”

Mrs. James no doubt would be uncomfortable with the slippery nature of our conversation about whether a preposition can properly serve as a sentence’s caboose. She believed in absolutes. Terminal prepositions either were allowed or they weren’t. To proceed otherwise was to invite chaos, both in writing – and in thinking.

 I sat in her class and diagrammed sentences in the mid-1960s, a time of turmoil, change and rancor. Perhaps she thought the young minds in her charge weren’t ready for the uncertainties of grammar or of life. I suspect she believed a disciplined, unambiguous approach was necessary for our development as good citizens. Regardless, she left us all to unravel the inconsistencies of language and usage on our own.

But if learning is hard, and it damned sure is, unlearning is even harder. You know?

Book critic Peter S. Prescott had someone like Mrs. James in mind, I suspect, when he defended end prepositions to Harper’s Morrises.

“Teachers don’t generally try to write,” he said, “but anyone who does knows that occasionally sentences will be ruined if terminal prepositions are forcibly bused to another neighborhood.”

Sportswriter and author Heywood Hale Broun sums it up nicely. “The object, after all, of purity is clarity and grace.”

That, brothers and sisters, is a thought up with which I WILL put.