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Subject:Up With Which I Will Not Put From:Moshe Koenig <alsacien -at- NETVISION -dot- NET -dot- IL> Date:Wed, 18 Sep 1996 20:40:42 PDT
>A young bumpkin from North Carolina is accepted as a freshman at
>Harvard...
Just for the record, I went to the Eastman School of Music, not
Harvard. I'd tend to agree about a lot of North Carolinians, but
I don't know if I fit the bill for the rest of the story.
The whole business of ending with a preposition is one about which the
prim schoolteachers back down in NC used to make quite an issue. I
still remember my third grade teacher, one of the vanishing breed
of old-maid school teachers, who even corrected our Weekly Reader
for improper grammar. We all became accustomed to speaking such
convoluted English in her presence that conjugating Latin verbs
was childs' play in comparison.
It was when I studied German that I understood the fallacy. Many
people want to think of English as a Latin tongue. I'd like to
think of my car as a Porsche, too, but that doesn't help me very
much in reality.
>Luckily, my credibility on this list has been shot for years, so this
>little indulgence shouldn't hurt me any. ;-)