A word, please: A notion writers should be disabused of

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve written about ending sentences with prepositions, I’d be about 5 cents shy of that Frappucino I’ve had my eye on. (I’d probably also be one of the top earners in what remains of the newspaper industry, but that’s a subject for another day.)

I’ve written about sentence-ending prepositions so many times over the last 12 years that I have to pace myself. Every time I think about revisiting the subject, I wonder: Is it too soon to bring it up again?

Then, without fail, I’m reminded of just how many people still labor under the very superstitions that I and others work to debunk. This time, the reminder came in a collection of reader poems the Los Angeles Times published in August. In one, a poet decried other people’s grammar mistakes, instructing readers to “Put prepositions where they belong. Not at the end. That is all wrong.”

The poem was cute and lyrical and well done, which made it all the more disappointing that the poet had her facts wrong. Instead of shedding light on grammar rules, the poem perpetuated a virulent falsehood that’s been circulating for more than a century.

I shrugged it off. But not everyone did. A few days later, an L.A. Times reader responded to the poem by sharing his own knowledge on sentence-ending prepositions: “An editor once rewrote a sentence of Winston Churchill’s in which Churchill ended a sentence with a preposition,” he noted in the paper’s letters section. “Churchill reportedly fired back, ‘This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put.’”

That’s a great story, as delightful as the poem that elicited it. Unfortunately, both are pure myth.

Variations on the Churchill story have been circulating for a long time, for obvious reasons. It’s fun to retell. In the most popular version, however, Churchill wasn’t against sentence-ending prepositions. He was for them. The quip, as the story usually goes, was actually a rant against editors who would twist a sentence into ugly knots simply to avoid a preposition at the end.

So the Times reader who told this story seems to have gotten the moral backward. But his errors don’t end there.

In recent years, researchers have determined that Churchill probably never said any such thing. Instead, the quip probably came from an unbylined writer for the Strand magazine and was later misattributed to Churchill, who also wrote for the Strand.

And what about the poet who so pithily scolded anyone who would put a preposition at the end of a sentence? I’ll let some experts tell you what they think about her alleged rule.

“Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.” — William Strunk Jr., “The Elements of Style”

“The preposition at the end has always been an idiomatic feature of English. It would be pointless to worry about the few who believe it is a mistake.” — Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage

“Superstition.” — H.W. Fowler, author of Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

“Good writers don’t hesitate to end their sentences with prepositions if doing so results in phrasing that seems natural.” — Garner’s Modern American Usage

“‘Never end a sentence with a preposition.’ … Wrong.” — Washington Post Business Copy Desk Chief Bill Walsh

“Good writers throughout the history of English — from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Alison Lurie and David Lodge — have not shrunk from ending clauses or sentences with prepositions.” — “Word Court” author Barbara Wallraff

“For years and years Miss Thistlebottom has been teaching her bright-eyed brats that no writer would end a sentence with a preposition if he knew what he was about. The truth is that no good writer would follow Miss Thistlebottom’s rule.” — Theodore M. Bernstein, “The Careful Writer”

And with that, it’s Frappucino time.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.