The preposition bugbear is a form of nit-picking up with which he will not put
Having weathered a season of unusually severe nit-picking by rigid readers, I am inclined to indulge myself by answering a couple of criticisms that are wrong.
“How unusual!” writes James N. Angelo of San Bernardino. “Two boo boos today in your usual error-free column. And how ironic that this particular column delineates your obsession with punctuality; yet another facet of your scrupulous and well-deserved reputation for accuracy, grammar-wise, detail-wise and other-wise.
“Your first sentence ends with a preposition (and despite the old wheeze that one can begin or end a sentence with any word in the English language) you and I know better, having long since learned the value of proper syntax and word usage, along with such other out-moded habits as ‘honesty, modesty and good manners.’ Right?”
Angelo’s tone is so amiable that I don’t wish to be supercilious in correcting him, but I must repeat, as politely as I can, what I have said many times in answer to that same complaint:
There is no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. In fact a preposition is often the best thing to end a sentence with . This imaginary rule is straight out of “Miss Thistelbottom’s Hobgoblins,” Theodore M. Bernstein’s “Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears and Outmoded Rules of English Usage.”
“The origin of the misguided rule is hard to ascertain,” Bernstein says. “To begin with, there is the meaning of the word preposition itself: stand before. The meaning derives from Latin, and in the Latin language prepositions do usually stand before the words they govern. But Latin is not English. In English, prepositions have been used as terminal words in a sentence since the days of Chaucer, and in that position they are completely idiomatic. . . .”
Keep in mind also the marginal note that Winston Churchill scribbled on a speech of his in which his secretary had “corrected” a sentence that ended in a preposition: “This is the sort of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put.”
“Your other faux pas,” Angelo goes on, “is in your 11th paragraph: ‘The only way the hostess can get people to go home is to remove the hors d’oeuvres (sic) from the buffet and close the bar.’ The following quote is from Andre Simon’s French Cook Book:
“ ‘Hors d’oeuvre means “outside the meal,” and regardless of how many different sorts may be provided “outside” or before any one meal, there is but one meal or “oeuvre,” so that, in French, “oeuvre” remains in the singular and “hors d’oeuvre” never is written “hors d’oeuvres.’ ”
Angelo adds: “The late, great James Beard was aware of this in his book ‘Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapes.”
French is not English. Whenever I write hors d’oeuvre (on my wife’s advice), some copy editor restores the s . The reason for this, evidently, is that our copy desk dictionary, Webster’s New World, indicates that the plural of hors d’oeuvre is hors d’oeuvres .
I also quote from the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage (second edition): “Hors d’oeuvres. This French phrase has been Americanized both as to meaning and as to formation of the plural. In French, more than one hors d’oeuvre are still hors d’oeuvre, because the phrase means ‘outside the meal.’ When Americans adopted the term to apply to small appetizers served before a meal, they simply added an s to indicate more than one such appetizer. Thus hors d’oeuvres as the plural form became standard usage in the United States.”
Having won those two, I feel it is only fair to admit my error in writing that the thieves who tried to rob us on a Paris street were dressed “like street people in ‘La Traviata.’ ” Two readers have pointed out that there are no street people in “Traviata.” As one of them suggested, I must have been thinking of “La Boheme.”
I am meanwhile gratified by a letter from Patricia Hill of Hermosa Beach, a bassoonist, who has a remarkable insight into my situation.
“If your mail were limited solely to those who write to correct the ‘errors’ of your written way,” she says, “you would never suffer the empty nyet syndrome. Your bungles, botches and burbles provoke responses from rich, varied resources of human experience--persons who were actually present at historic moments, who have lived in ‘foreign’ settings, who speak the language, or whose scholarly interests have provided esoteric knowledge. And they’re all out there waiting for you, some with the outrage of their rightness, some with the wish to amplify your perspective, and some with a good-natured wish to share their own experience. What a harvest!”
Naturally Ms. Hill was writing to add to this harvest.
“Now I must join their ranks, for I was rankled by your otherwise appreciative account of the recent Marine Band concert. . . . You noted the presence of women musicians playing flute, piccolo and clarinet and overlooked the contribution of the female bassoonist. As a bassoonist I cannot let this omission pass unremarked. . . .”
As an example of “esoteric” nit-picking, Ms. Hill recalled a letter received by the research team hired to assure historical accuracy of setting, costumes, etc., for the film “Cleopatra” (the one with Liz Taylor). “It complained that the occupants of the emperor’s box at the Coliseum, who were shown eating (sybaritically, no doubt) peeled grapes, were obviously consuming a varietal grape unknown in ancient times.”
May I point out that the amphitheater Ms. Hill refers to is spelled Colosseum, not Coliseum, like our own arena?
But I’ll never overlook a female bassoonist again.