This would be more than she could put up with | Sam Venable
There’s been an item in the news not a lot of people care about.
In fact, they’ve likely never thought of it before.
Except for writers and English majors, they won’t even know what it’s concerning.
I speak of the hullabaloo in literary circles about where the preposition in a sentence is supposed to wind up.
Merriam-Webster, the 193-year-old dictionary company in Springfield, Massachusetts, and keeper of protocol for all things written or spoken in the English language, recently proclaimed, “It is permissible for a preposition to be what you end a sentence with.”
If you’re scratching your head right now and saying, “Wow, it’s awful early in the day for Venob to be in the sauce,” you might as well move on to comics or sports, because you’ll never understand where this thesis is going toward.
Apparently, a pair of 17th-century wordsmiths, poet John Dryden and grammarian Joshua Poole (highbrows who surely thought everybody else was dumber than six teams of oxen), invented this preposition-placement nonsense and laughed riotously about what they had just cooked up.
In no time, the Dryden-Poole tomfoolery evolved into a dictum of “Thou Shalt Not!” throughout academia, generating untold millions of dollars for the red ink industry because that’s the kind of pen most English teachers grade theme papers with.
Only some four-eyed geek who played first-string benchwarmer on the 1962-64 Young High School football team (but somehow convinced the head cheerleader to go on a date and become his wife years later) swallowed this nutty mandate hook, line and sinker — which was apropos, considering his eventual line of (ha-ha) “work” — and signed onto it.
East Tennessee newspapering has pretty much gone to hell since.
However, this nerd — who, naturally, aced English in both high school and college — is certain that Geneva Anderson, his senior English teacher, would be shocked because she expected her students to go above and beyond.
He’s also certain the first thing Miss Anderson would do is have everyone at Merriam-Webster, from CEO to the janitorial staff, march to the front of the classroom and give them what for.
“Your so-called ‘attempt to set straight the record’ is heresy,” she would declare, “with which a 10-foot pole I would not touch! In fact, this is just the sort of scholastic down-watering, up with I simply will not put!”
Doubtless, Miss Anderson’s spot-on critique would go down in the annals of literary history as the worst shellacking anybody had ever heard of.
Let alone actually suffered through.
Sam Venable’s column appears every Sunday. Contact him at sam.venable@outlook.com.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Sam Venable: This would be more than she could put up with
