"The Most Annoying Thing Ever"

While I find it hard to believe that something could in fact be “the most annoying thing ever” my best friend swears that my tendency to end sentences in prepositions has taken that title. She has a tendency to be a bit dramatic, but once she pointed out how often I do it, I also became annoyed. She tells me it is at its worst when we are leaving the apartment to go somewhere and I am searching for the pieces of my life, asking questions such as; “Where’s my purse at? Or what are we waiting for?” These are the types of things I get yelled at by my friends (and my mother) all the time and until this assignment forced me to dig deeper into the official rule, I honestly assumed I was wrong.

Well guess what…I am not.

Before I get to brag though, I should set down the framework for understanding what a preposition is. According to the dictionary a preposition is: “any member of a class of words found in many languages that are used before nouns, pronouns, or other substantives to form phrases functioning as modifiers of verbs, nouns, or adjectives, and that typically express a spatial, temporal, or other relationship, as in, on, by, to, since.” Basically a preposition shows the relationship between ideas in a sentence.

So where does the idea that it is grammatically wrong to end a sentence in one of these darling little add-ons come from? The answer to that question lies in the roots of our language; Latin, which we all know is not the most up to date language in the world, considering almost no one speaks it anymore. While there are many valid grammar rules that have their roots in this beloved language, this is simply not one of them anymore. Grammarians agree across the board; ending a sentence in a preposition is a-ok.

The debate comes from the method by which people try and fix a sentence that ends in a preposition.

When the sentence, That's the writer I must talk to becomes That’s the writer to whom I must talk it sounds instantly more formal and less like how people actually speak. This is what happens when we try and put this outdated rule into action; our writing becomes unnecessarily awkward sounding, and incredibly clumsy in organization. Usually when this rule is followed in speech or in writing sentences become cluttered with too many “to which” or “to whom” phrases and it actually makes more sense to just end with the preposition. Winston Churchill made this point famous after a reporter mocked him for ending a sentence in a preposition at a press conference; his reply to the reporter? "This is something up with which I shall not put!" Clearly making fun of the reporter’s insistence on being grammatically correct even when the corrected sentence sounds terribly awkward.

The standard rule for when a sentence can end in a preposition is somewhere along the lines of; in the case where the pronoun is that, which cannot be preceded by a preposition, or if the pronoun is omitted altogether, then the preposition must occur at the end at the end of the sentence.

So all these years that friends, teachers and parents have tried to convince me that I am wrong for the way I speak, I was right. I used to spend so much time and energy trying to correct myself when I spoke, making sure that I wouldn’t sound like some uneducated, Midwestern hick. There was not any need though; grammarians have convinced me that there is nothing to change. A sentence in the English language can end in a preposition and no one will die, the world won’t end, and the sun will keep shining.


To all my friends out there: Want proof that I am correct? Check out my sources
The Language Log:

Everything2:

Grammar Girl:

Grammar Tips:

Dictionary