A Lively Pedant Still Beating Dead Preposition Issue

Roy Copperud had no sooner died the other day than I had occasion to consult his excellent book, “American Usage and Style: The Consensus.”

Copperud was a retired USC journalism professor and an expert on grammar and usage. His book cites the opinions of several other experts and seeks a consensus, though often that consensus is his own opinion.

What caused me to consult him was a seven-page typed letter from Lyn Arnold Sherwood of San Juan Capistrano, a writer, listing numerous alleged usage errors that he says he finds in the press and on the air, and accusing me of having a “cavalier attitude” toward correct grammar.

“Your justification for ending sentences in prepositions, and other assaults against our language,” he said, “seems to be the L.A. Times and UPI stylebooks, which arrogantly change the language, without academic justification.

“Ending a sentence in a preposition should be grounds for a severe beating about the head and shoulders. But, today, such a sin is common.”

Sherwood says he knows he is “at risk of being accused of pedantry,” which, indeed, he is guilty of. (Or should I say, “of which, indeed, he is guilty?”)

I turned to Copperud for support. He does not fail me. He calls the notion that sentences shouldn’t end in prepositions a superstition. “In writing, as distinguished from rule-reciting, the avoidance of the end preposition is more evident, perhaps, in structural detours that start with a preposition followed by which . Few care about making the world a better place to live in , but nearly everyone wants to make it a better place in which to live . ‘The car she was riding in,’ after editing with zeal and ignorance, becomes ‘The car in which she was riding.’ ”

Copperud notes that the superstition is derided by the sainted H. W. Fowler “and many another authority on language.” He quotes Sir Winston Churchill’s classic rebuke to an underling who sought to edit a terminal preposition from one of his speeches:

“This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”

(Oddly, Sherwood distorts that Churchillian remark to his own cause in another context. “This constant destruction of the English language is something up with which I shall no longer put.” I have heard the other quote, in slightly varied forms, many times. Sherwood’s version I have never heard. Churchill might have said it, though, if he was referring to the excision of a prepositional ending.

“You can show that sentences with the preposition at the end,” Copperud says, “are more forceful than those that have been recast to avoid it; you can cite masters of English prose from Chaucer to Churchill who employ end prepositions freely and consciously; and you can prove that such usage is established literary English, but the superstitious will still wince at it.”

Fowler devotes nearly two pages to “Preposition-at-End” in “Modern English Usage,” which was published in 1926, long before the L.A. Times Stylebook. “It is a cherished superstition,” he says, “that prepositions must, in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late (‘They are the fittest timber to make great politics of,’ said Bacon, and ‘What are you hitting me for,’ says the modern schoolboy’) be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern.

“The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by English in putting its prepositions late . . . is an important element in the flexibility of the language.”

Fowler gives examples of this use by England’s most distinguished writers over six centuries, from Chaucer “ . . . more to be wondered upon,” to Kipling, “Too horrible to be trifled with.”

Theodore M. Bernstein lists the superstition among his “Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins,” and observes: “So many authorities on usage have tried to correct the impression that it is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition that I almost feel as if I were flogging a dying horse. But the horse doesn’t die. Every now and again some blindfolded rider trots him out on his rickety legs and prods him into whinnying ‘Nay.’ I get the feeling that some pedagogues have been feeding him on the sly--perhaps in the open.”

Sherwood also feeds a couple of other dying horses in the grammar of sportscasters. He deplores, for instance, the use of the present tense to describe things past, as in, “If he catches the ball, it’s a sure double play, but he muffs it.”

Sportscasters know instinctively that the present tense is more vivid that the past perfect. (“If he had caught the ball, it would have been. . . . “) This horse is dead.

Sherwood flogs a few other dead horses, including the use of none as a plural, with are.

But none are more hopeless than his belief that a preposition is not a good thing to end a sentence with.