It used to bother me. I was pretty sure it was wrong to end sentences with prepositions yet I saw everybody doing it on LJ, in fictions I read, or even in blogs, so I began to think I might have been wrong about the whole thing. Now I'm just confused.
It's an old one, that. In Latin it's very poor style to end a sentence with a proposition. So in the Victorian period, when academics like Sweet (of "Anglo-Saxon Reader fame) and his cohorts were working to make English studies respectable in universities, one way they did it was to extend and develop a prescriptive grammar, which included many Latin-style prohibitions. Split infinitives are another.
In most cases it's a matter of euphony. If it's possible to put the preposition elsewhere and still flow smoothly, fine. If not, it's better to put the preposition at the end that add extra words and phrases to extend the sentence and create a laboured sentence-structure. Churchill famously wrote "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.", where the sentence is so clearly clunky that it satirises the whole idea.
This does not help the non-native speaker who hasn't got the instinctive feel for what sounds right, I know. I'd say these days you would worry about it only in the most formal of contexts. Does that help?
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Date: 2008-02-05 06:50 pm (UTC)It's an old one, that. In Latin it's very poor style to end a sentence with a proposition. So in the Victorian period, when academics like Sweet (of "Anglo-Saxon Reader fame) and his cohorts were working to make English studies respectable in universities, one way they did it was to extend and develop a prescriptive grammar, which included many Latin-style prohibitions. Split infinitives are another.
In most cases it's a matter of euphony. If it's possible to put the preposition elsewhere and still flow smoothly, fine. If not, it's better to put the preposition at the end that add extra words and phrases to extend the sentence and create a laboured sentence-structure. Churchill famously wrote "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.", where the sentence is so clearly clunky that it satirises the whole idea.
This does not help the non-native speaker who hasn't got the instinctive feel for what sounds right, I know. I'd say these days you would worry about it only in the most formal of contexts. Does that help?