Readers Come Down on His Use of <i> Up</i>

Once in a very great while, I make a dumb mistake, and the mistake unravels to a joyful end. I don’t mean that it is only once in a very great while that I make a dumb mistake; that happens all the time. It’s the joyful unraveling that is rare.

In a Nov. 27 column I said, speaking of grammatic analysis, “A statement like ‘Jack and Jill went up the hill’ poses few problems.” I then said that the up in that line was an adverb. I didn’t say so, but my obvious implication was that up modifies went.

I got three letters telling me that up in that sentence is not an adverb, but a preposition whose object is “the hill.” Grant Sharman of Hollywood, Michael D. Doyle of Covina and Anita Rosen of Rolling Hills Estates all were kind enough to straighten me out. I’ve heard from Mr. Sharman before, and we usually see eye to eye, I think. Mr. Doyle and Ms. Rosen both teach English, and I’m particularly delighted to hear from English teachers who care about grammar, know their adverbs from their prepositions, and impart their knowledge to their students. If you’ve been out of the educational system for a few years, you might not realize that most English teachers consider grammar to be not merely a waste of time, but actually crippling to the creative process.

My feeling is that a solid grounding in traditional grammatic structure, far from being crippling, is a great help to the creative process, as it helps the writer frame his concepts in a form that will be readily understood by the reader, who will not have his train of thought derailed by questionable usage. Much of the writing that gets into print these days is studded with distracting syntactical blunders. Reading such stuff is analogous to riding a bicycle along a road full of potholes. The scenery may be beautiful, teeming with wildflowers, babbling brooks and butterflies; but if the road is booby-trapped, it might as well be a gravel pit. Just so, no matter how exquisite may be the ideas that blossom in the writer’s head, if he unwittingly fills his pages with stylistic potholes, they’ll destroy the reader’s concentration.

My “Jack and Jill” analysis was marred not by a stylistic blunder, but by an out-and-out error of fact. My critics were absolutely correct, and my mistake, while not necessarily a pip, was at least a minor doozy.

Up is a utility man of a word. It can be used as an adjective, an adverb, a noun, a preposition or a verb: an adjective, as in “What’s up?” and “The jig is up”; an adverb, as in “They went up” and “I got up”; a noun, as in “Elevator operators have their ups and downs”; a preposition, as in the already-noted “Jack and Jill went up the hill” or “They sent him up the river”; and a verb, as in “We’ve got to up the price of a beer.” If Jack and Jill had simply gone up, up would have been an adverb, but since they went up the hill, the hill becomes the object of up, transforming it into a preposition.

Like many words, preposition has an obvious derivation--so obvious that it zips past us unnoticed. Since it usually stands before the word it governs, it is called a preposition, from the Latin prae (before) and positio (position).

It’s a good bet that this pre-position derivation is the source of the old bugaboo about ending a sentence with a preposition. Obviously, if the very meaning of a word is that it is “pre-positioned,” the reasoning must have gone, we cannot in good conscience place it at the very end of the line. I heard many years ago that it was Winston Churchill who first said, “That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put” when someone cautioned him on that score. It might have been Churchill, but, on the other hand, it might have been almost anyone with a nice sense of language. It was always a silly prohibition--certainly nothing about which to worry (what a ridiculous way to say “nothing to worry about”).

My thanks to you who wrote me. The conventional wisdom, last I heard, said that something like 1% of the people who feel like writing in about this sort of thing actually do so. I hope that figure is accurate. That would be a joyful unraveling, indeed. Three hundred concerned people. Not bad for these times. I’ll sign off with my favorite prepositional-sentence-ending-user: the little girl who asked, “What did you bring that book I didn’t want to be read to out of up for?” Churchill would have loved her.