Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
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Path: utzoo!lsuc!msb
From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Grammatical Rules
Message-ID: <385@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-Feb-85 18:15:58 EST
Article-I.D.: lsuc.385
Posted: Sun Feb 10 18:15:58 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Feb-85 20:16:26 EST
References: <34@gitpyr.UUCP> <328@scc.UUCP> <259@psivax.UUCP>  <537@unc.UUCP> <2289@mit-hermes.ARPA>
Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader)
Distribution: net
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 29
Summary: Can somebody VERIFY the Churchill quote please?

We've had two versions of Churchill on prepositions ending sentences
so far.  Neither one agrees exactly with the version* I'd heard of.
There must be somebody reading this who has access to a reference
that gives the correct and authoritative version.  Would they please
find it and post it --- quickly, before we have half a dozen more
postings on the topic?

> > I think Winston Churchill said it best.  When told that you should
> > not end a sentence with a preposition, he replied:
> > 
> > 	"This is something up with which I shall not put."
> 
> You've not only misquoted him, you've done it in such a way as to destroy the 
> whole point of what he was saying. He actually said:
> 
> "[Dangling prepositions] are something up with which I shall not put."

*"My" version agrees in spirit with the first one, but amplifies
 it to "This is the kind of arrant pedantic nonsense up with which..."
 Since Churchill was one of the greatest English-language-users ever,
 and prepositions-at-the-end are grammatical English, I'm quite sure
 that the second person has it wrong.


Was anybody bothered by the sentence ending with a preposition in this
article?  Was anybody bothered by the common-gender-singular "they"?
I thought not.

Mark Brader