Ending with a Preposition

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Melanie Hayward from Madison, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Melanie. How are you doing?

I’m doing all right today. How are you?

Super. What do you got on your mind?

I’m wondering, is there ever an instance in which it is appropriate to end a sentence with a preposition?

And in particular, I’m wondering about emails, because sometimes I find that if you put the preposition where I think it’s supposed to be,

It sounds a little pretentious or maybe just kind of choppy.

And then also sometimes when verbs carry the preposition with them, like involved in, if you should split those up.

Melanie, I’m going to sound like Barack Obama here, but yes, you can.

You absolutely can end a sentence with a preposition.

Let’s end this prohibition once and for all.

Absolutely.

And Grant, I know you agree with me.

I do indeed.

It is almost 100% perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition.

What’s the deal with the rumor that you can’t?

Do you want the nice answer or the mean one?

I kind of like the mean answer, but I’ll take both.

Well, I’ll give you a compromise answer.

This rule has been spread by the uninformed,

And it’s held onto by people who haven’t updated their grammar education since the fifth grade.

Yeah, this is a rule that started to come about 300 years ago or so, back when these grammarians were trying to standardize the English language because it was still a little unruly at that time.

And so what they did for a lot of their rules was they looked to Latin, the much older language, the much more established language with a lot more established rules.

And one of the things that they noticed about Latin was that in Latin, a preposition is always followed by its object.

I mean, think about the words from Latin that we have in English, ad infinitum, post mortem, cum laude.

You don’t see those prepositions at the end of a sentence, but that’s Latin.

And English works a little differently.

The same thing happened, Melanie, with split infinitives.

You know how people say, don’t split an infinitive?

Don’t say to boldly go where no man has gone before?

The reason is because in Latin, the infinitives are just a single word.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

You know, I was a Spanish and a French major in college, so that kind of made this be a

Little more concrete with me, because in French and Spanish, that’s the case, too.

Aha, you’re exactly right.

And so, of course, you can’t split an infinitive in Spanish or in Latin because it’s one word.

But you can’t really apply that to English because then you get people saying faithfully to execute the office of president of the United States.

Then you get a rather embarrassing moment in front of the world, don’t you?

Right, for the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

And so these are a couple of these so-called rules that have been handed down to us, but they were created by these blue-nosed grammarians who were trying to apply the rules of Latin to English.

Well, they falsely believed that Latin was a perfect language, didn’t they?

Right, and it’s not.

And English works differently.

So, yes, absolutely.

You know, Winston Churchill is one of many people who have described that rule as nonsense up with which I will not put.

All right.

Well, that’s really good to hear.

So to reiterate, you can end sentences with a preposition.

It’s possible.

It’s legal.

It’s allowed in English.

The only people who prevent it are people who don’t know better, and they need to throw that rule right out the window.

Well, I will spread the word.

All right.

Thank you for your call, Melanie.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve begun to wonder if something you long held to be true in English isn’t, give us a call.

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