Re: Prepositions--ending sentences therewith

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

|} From: John Holland <uunet!robcad!john -at- UUNET -dot- UU -dot- NET>


|} I can't resist contributing the below to this thread. The King James
|} Version of the Bible, first two editions published in 1611, quotes
|} Jesus as saying (John 4:32):
|}
|}     I have meat to eat that ye know not of.
|}
|} That's not the only place in the KJV where a preposition ends a sentence.
|} But the KJV to the contrary notwithstanding, I don't allow that
|} practice in my department. And "data" is plural, and infinitives are
|} not split, and....
|}

Surely the esteemed readership of this list realizes that the ``rule''
against ending a sentence with a preposition was invented by Dryden, a
seventeenth century poet. He believed that since the construction was
not allowed in Latin, it was ``inelegant'' in English. A century later,
Gibbon, a historian, added that we should avoid ending sentences with
adverbs that _sound_ like prepositions, just to be sure.

Surely, the writer of the above message knows that Jesus did not speak
English, and that the King James Bible is a translation? And that the
terminal preposition was an accepted part of English before the ``Dryden-
Gibbon Rule.''

Having said that, I tend to avoid the construction in my technical
writing, simply because so many people in my audience BELIEVE that
it is bad grammar that its presence in a technical manual might
distract their attention away from the message.

In all other writing, I refuse to kowtow to the perverse beliefs of
dead poets.
    _______________   _____
   /  ___  __/__\  \ /  / _\    Steve Fouts
  /___ \|  |  ___\  |  /  __\   sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
 /   /  \  |      \   /      \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "She understood, as he did, that all writing
was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect
for tradition"                  --Stanislaw Lem