Prepositional propriety
What's the current party line, among the Authorities That Be, about the old prohibition against ending a sentence w/ a preposition? Is it now considered formally acceptable to say (or write), "That...
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Only a few diehard holdouts insist on following this rule. The vast majority of prescriptivists don't find fault with ending a sentence with a preposition.Remember Orwell's sixth rule of writing:...
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I think most modern authorities agree that it's OK if avoiding it makes the sentence awkward or unclear. In other words, it is a possible stylistic flaw which that be weighed against other...
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It may be apocryphal, but I heard it said that Churchill (who was a great enemy of the preposition at the end of a sentence) is said to have exclaimed that such a grammatical construction was a...
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The version I have heard from several sources was that *criticism* of putting a prepostion at the end of the sentence was "the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I shall not put". That seems more...
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Yes, he was asserting his God-given right to end a sentence with one. I thought the quote was "arrogant pedantry", not "arrant nonsense", but it's still in the same ballpark. He was mocking the...
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Hey, does anyone here (UBsters?) still use "without" to mean "outside (of)"?I use it only in the set phrase "within and without". Otherwise, it sounds archaic to me. Still, I have some vague sense...
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The exact words may be unrecoverable (or indeed, fictitious) but the point of the story is as I remembered it. See www.wsu.edu/~brians/error...chill.html for a list of the variations, and a citation...
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The canny Scots have inverted the word to "outwith" but I'm not sure what it means. Maybe others say it, too. Anyone? Btw, we don't use "without" in the sense you talk about, wg.
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This would be the perfect opportunity to use 'whence' for 'where ... from'. "That town is whence I came" or even 'from whence I came', and "This website is whence she gets her linguistic knowledge". I...
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wg I wouldn't use without in the outside sense myself but would definitely recognise it if I heard it. One of my favourite scenes in Terry Pratchett's 'Wyrd Sisters' uses it:Cook: There is a knocking...
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and of course there is the old Oestre (oops I mean Easter) hymn"There is a green hill far away without a city wall"I always used to wonder why a hill would ever need to have a wall, till I realised it...
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