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Comment by drbaskin | Hacker News Reader

You should never end a sentence with a preposition.

The mathematician Paul Halmos loved issues like these and once constructed a sentence that ends in five prepositions: "What did you want to bring that book that I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"

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  I lately lost a preposition
  It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
  And angrily I cried, "Perdition!
  Up from out of in under there."

  Correctness is my vade mecum,
  And straggling phrases I abhor,
  And yet I wondered, "What should he come
  Up from out of in under for?"

-Morris Bishop in the New Yorker, 27th September, 1947

This is the kind of thing up with which I will not put.

In my mind this "sentence" validates the need for the rule. :-)

Ah, but can you rephrase it using the rule to make it better?

"For what did you bring up that book from out of which I did not want to be read?"

Not a huge improvement.

I'd say it's an improvement; unlike the original, I am able to parse your version.

It's a shitty and awkward sentence to begin with (with which to begin), primarily because it unnecessarily uses the passive voice to entangle two ideas that are clearer when approached one at a time in the active voice:

I didn't want anyone to read out of that book to me. Why did you want to bring it up?

See? Contrary to what is suggested above, the whole thing is MUCH better with the active voice. Note that in the case of "bring up," "up" is an adverb, not a preposition, so I am not ending the second sentence with a preposition.

Why did you bring me this book? I don't want to read it.

Speak normally and you don't have an issue. :-)

Simpler, but with a changed meaning. The original speaker does not want to be read to from the book; he does not contemplate reading it to himself.

"I do not want to be read to from that book, why did you bring it?"

There is always a better rewrite.

Every language has ways of "legally" abusing it. Individual examples of which do not invalidate the language as a whole.