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To: dr_lew

Whats your position on ending sentences with prepositons. These are things I want to know about.


51 posted on 12/05/2009 11:49:01 PM PST by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Delacon

My position is that the proscription of sentence-ending prepositions is an artifact of grammatical fascism, which was overthrown in the fifties and sixties, I think. I remember one time looking up some point or another about the dative case or something, and as I rooted through old grammar books in the library, a had an epiphany. “They’re just making all this stuff up!” I thought to myself. Grammar had become a bed of Procrustes, and the contortions required to fit every usage into a category were extreme.

Everybody recognizes this these days, and even when I was in high school, for that matter. In the tradition of “one extreme to the other” it seems as though the teaching of grammar was pretty much discarded altogether as a result of this trend, which is a shame. Of course there is structure to language, that is namely grammar, and some modicum of discipline can certainly be learned and applied with advantage to its usage. Know what I mean?


53 posted on 12/06/2009 12:16:41 AM PST by dr_lew
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