I recently came across this article on the Smithsonian’s website: Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong: And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about.
The article claims, yes, that ending sentences with prepositions is A-OK, starting sentences with conjunctions is NOT a mortal sin, and splitting infinitives (i.e., “to run”) with an adverb (i.e., “badly”) is perfectly acceptable.
…WHAT?! YOU MEAN ALL THESE RULES I’VE BEEN LEARNING MY WHOLE LIFE ARE FALSE! WHAT?!
OK, now that that‘s out of my system, I can break this down a little better. The article’s authors, Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellarman, the curators of Grammarphobia.com, state:
[W]e can blame misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favorite language on English. Anglican bishop Robert Lowth popularized the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar; while Henry Alford, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, was principally responsible for the infinitive taboo, with his publication of A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864.
Confusion over which way is right and which way is wrong may have developed because Latin-based and Germanic-based languages are so different. Trying to apply Latin rules to Germanic structure just doesn’t make sense.
Because I took three semesters of Latin in college¹ (no joke), I am now ordaining myself the best person to provide an explanation of why that’s so.
The best example, I think, is that Latin nouns have cases for their different functions in a sentence. For example, there’s a case for direct objects and a case for indirect objects.
In English, when we want to use a direct object in a sentence, we don’t change the spelling of the noun. “I hit the ball.” The “ball,” the direct object, would be spelled the same if it was used as the subject.
In Latin, forget that. There’s a case for subjects and a different case for direct objects. And the words would have the same root but with different additions, causing different spellings.
Having cases determine a word’s function instead of its place in a sentence is actually pretty cool because, if you want to show a connection between two nouns, you can have them next to each other in the sentence without affecting the meaning of that sentence.
So, if you want to show a close bond between a brother and a sister, in Latin you would write, “Frater sororem eius amat.”
In English, that translates to “The brother loves his sister.” “Amat” is the verb “loves.” “Sister” is a direct object; in English, the word goes after the verb, but in Latin the case of “sister” identifies it as the object receiving the action.
Written directly into English, that Latin sentence would look like this: “The brother his sister loves.” See? You can show that close connection (in an almost meta way) with the actual, physical² words. Isn’t that cool? Yes, yes it is.
Jesus, how did I get so far off base? Anyway, about the article and its claims: the authors state one linguist thinks the conjunction rule began because English teachers didn’t want students starting every sentence with “and.” And, really, why would you want to? That’s boring.
Sometimes ending sentences with prepositions is unavoidable (“Who were you with?” — as opposed to the snobbish “With whom were you?”), and sometimes it’s just annoying (“Where you at?” — where the hell is the verb?) Splitting infinitives is common, and I didn’t even know that was a supposed rule until senior year of high school.
I don’t think these “rules” really bother people. Many people still start a sentence here and there with conjunctions, end them with prepositions when they don’t want to sound stuck-up, split infinitives without a second thought.
The lesson here? People like to break rules, even if those rules, I guess, technically, don’t exist.
1. I can’t believe how pretentious that sounds.
2. Well, not really physical, but you get the point.
Behind Blue Skies 