Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

>from where they're sourcing the food

Completely off topic, but do you naturally avoid ending sentences with prepositions, or do you edit your sentences when you realize you've done it? Like many people, I was taught in school not to do that, but the lesson never stuck because I really don't care enough. However, I can easily see when myself or others have ended with a preposition or (more notably) when they avoided it like you did.

It's one of those things that stands out to me as a language nerd. It's something that I want to not care about, but deep inside I'm super conflicted on.

View on HN

If I may alleviate your preposition anxiety, a quote from Garner's Modern American Usage (p. 654):

> The spurious rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a remnant of Latin grammar, in which a preposition was the one word that a writer could not end a sentence with. But Latin grammar should never straitjacket English grammar. If the superstition is a "rule" at all, it is a rule of rhetoric and not of grammar, the idea being to end sentences with strong words that drive a point home...

> Winston Churchill's witticism about the absurdity of this bugaboo should have laid it to rest. When someone once upbraided him for ending a sentence with a preposition, he rejoined, "That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put."

I once received an angry email from a reader of my book complaining about sentences ending with prepositions; my reply ended every sentence with a preposition. Perhaps I enjoyed that too much.

I agree with you're point, but that quote may not be from Churchill

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.h...

As a language nerd you should know that the don't-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition "rule" is a total hoax perpetuated by latinists who thought English grammar was too impure. Well, English is not Latin. English has always ended sentences with prepositions -- Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the King James all do it. And you shouldn't be ashamed of doing it either.

I know it's not inherent to the English language, that's why I want to not care about it. But it's also something that was ingrained into me early in my education, so it's something I care about a little. Like multiplication tables. No one cares about multiplication tables but they're hard to forget when you're drilled on it from 4th grade to high school.

That seems like a bad example, since those tables are objectively correct and do have quotidian use, rather than being a falsehood of which knowledge is actually harmful.

Yeah - I'm old, and I guess that syntax became habit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com