Merriam-Webster finally agrees prepositions are something you can end a sentence with
When I was little, I was blessed with a second-grade teacher who was slightly less Ayatollah-like than the rest, whom I usually encountered only on the playground as they stalked the premises enforcing a brand of elementary-school criminal justice that made waterboarding look like a pool party.
This discipline was enforced in the name of our safety, which was rich for two reasons. One, their medieval forms of punishment, which involved long, flat boards and rubber hoses, left more welts than any ineffectual fight between two 7-year-olds.
Two, our playground was paved with highway-grade macadam, which meant that even sanctioned activities often produced serious injury. More than a couple kids, hanging by their knees from monkey bars that were a good six feet off the ground, split open their domes when they lost purchase on the smooth, slippery metal.
My second-grade teacher was known for her lax discipline on the playground, not paying much attention to us at all, unless someone came running up to her shrieking “Donna busted her head open,” and even then, medical attention took a back seat to a brief but impactful lecture on the difference between bust and burst.
Nowhere was Mrs. K more on her game than when someone would say something along the lines of “Where’s the (chalkboard) eraser at?” Immediately she would snap “Between the A and the T.”
We were too young at that point to know about prepositions and the rule against ending a sentence with one of these demon parts of speech. So we just had to take her word for it, even though I found her standard rebuke to be confusing.
“Between the A and the T” made no sense to me, and I worried about it a lot because I was sure there was some clever joke or wordplay that I was missing. Besides, while the “at” in “Where is the eraser at?” was superfluous, so are a lot of other words we incorporate into our language.
By ninth grade I was finally ready to go public with my concerns, which by now I understood involved the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. “Where is it at,” I posited, lent an ornamental balance to the sentence that, while technically unnecessary, did no appreciable harm.
Then I dropped the hammer. If you were to contract the adverb and the verb (perfectly allowable), the “at” became almost essential: Where’s it at? vs. Where’s it? Check and mate.
No one cared. No other kids were even paying attention, and my teacher only pretended to be impressed by my thought process, with about the same amount of sincerity as a congratulations on your work anniversary on LinkedIn.
Today though, a full half-century later, victory is mine.
Last week, no less an authority than Merriam-Freaking-Webster came out with a statement that Tim Rowland was right. They didn’t put it quite that way, although they should have. Instead, the usage authorities wrote, simply, “Ending a sentence with a preposition (such as with, of, and to) is permissible in the English language.”
M-W notes that the preposition rule was a product of dusty old literary fossils who, 12 centuries after the fall of Rome, were disappointed that people no longer spoke Latin. (These same criminals insisted that infinitives not be split because the Latins didn’t do it — never mind that in Latin infinitives are one word, and can no more be split than we would split understandable into understand and able.)
So, finally, you can relax, y’all. You can stop saying “On which channel is ‘Ice Road Truckers?” No more “With whom are you going to the strip show?” Sayonara, “For what purpose is the banjo?”
I know it’s been bothering you. Don’t thank me now.
Seems the new Dark Lilac ink lacks the luster of the original. Honestly, is nothing sacred?
Alas, the conspiracy theorists have even come for Wilt Chamberlain
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: You can end that sentence with a preposition now
